Interior Dept. proposes expansion of offshore drilling

WASHINGTON —  The Interior Department has put the final touches on a five-year plan to expand oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the shores of Alaska and Virginia.

Interior officials said Friday that the plan would include more environmental buffer zones around lease areas and would incorporate minor changes to a previous draft. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is scheduled to announce the “major oil and gas development program” Monday, a department statement said.

The new plan “would significantly increase the nation’s domestic energy supplies while protecting the coastal and marine environments, and provide a major economic stimulus to the nation and participating coastal states,” the statement said.

Details were sketchy, but in January, Bush ended drilling bans in an area of the central Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. That action cleared the way for:

* Making an area in the Gulf of Mexico south of Florida’s Panhandle available for drilling. Lease Area 181 is a small part of the 8.2 million acres that Congress approved for oil and gas development in December.

* Opening 5.6 million acres to drilling in waters northwest of the Alaska Peninsula, known for endangered whales and the world’s largest run of sockeye salmon. Interior plans to sell leases there in 2010 and 2012, pending environmental reviews. An estimated 200 million barrels of oil and 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist under those federal waters.

Interior’s plan would for the first time allow drilling off Virginia’s eastern shore, in a wedge-shaped area between the Maryland and North Carolina state lines stretching to a point about 200 miles east.

Congress put Alaska’s Bristol Bay off-limits to drilling in 1989 after the devastating Exxon Valdez tanker oil spill on the other side of the peninsula. The bay is a major fishing area for salmon, cod, red king crab, halibut and herring.

Congress lifted that ban in 2003, but the area remained under a presidential drilling ban until Bush lifted it in January.

Kempthorne has said his department is looking at conducting one or two lease sales there over the next five years, but only after environmental review.

Environmentalists say the proposed leasing areas overlap the migratory route for wild salmon.

Congress will have until the end of June to review the final drilling plan for all three areas.