U.S. Acts to Slow Offshore Drilling : Increases Time Between Sales but Offers Northwest Tracts

WASHINGTON —  The Interior Department today proposed slowing down most leasing of offshore oil and gas drilling tracts, while offering acreage in waters off the Pacific Northwest for the first time in 27 years.

The first draft of the department’s next five-year plan, which cannot go into effect for about two years, lays out a tentative schedule calling for one sale every three years instead of one every other year in areas outside the Gulf of Mexico. Sales in the central and western gulf would continue to be held annually.

The bulk of offshore production already is in the gulf, and industry believes that the most likely prospects lie there.

Other new sales on the Interior Department’s proposed schedule are in the Norton Basin, Central California, the Navarin Basin, Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, Southern California, Cook Inlet, Shumagin, North Atlantic, Northern California, Kodiak and St. George Basin.

The scheduling of a sale in waters off Oregon and Washington for April, 1991, was a surprise because the area had been considered unpromising. A $35-million lease of 101 tracts in that area in 1964 resulted in the drilling of only a dozen wells, all dry holes.

The current schedule, which took effect in 1982, calls for 41 sales through June, 1987. The draft proposed today lists 43, but five are to be re-offerings of rejected tracts. Eleven of the offerings scheduled in 1982 subsequently were delayed and are listed in the new program.

The plan does not change the “area-wide” system established by former Interior Secretary James G. Watt that threw open nearly the entire U.S. coastline for potential drilling. That system was vigorously attacked by environmentalists but was upheld in court.

Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel said today that he is focusing the program on “promising acreage” and adjusting the pace of leasing in the light of the downward trend in oil prices.

But he also added a proposal to give him authority to speed up sales in the event new economic or geologic data is brought to light after the schedule is set.

Mayor Bradley opposed. Part II, Page 1.