PANAMA CITY — The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) held a pair of meetings in Panama City on Tuesday to solicit public comment on a proposal to open up new areas in the Gulf of Mexico for natural gas and oil production.
The meeting was the first of several scoping meetings scheduled along the Gulf Coast this week as the agency begins development of a supplemental environmental impact statement, which will analyze the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of oil and natural gas leasing, exploration, development and production at the two proposed sites.
Gary Goeke, chief of BOEM’s environmental assessments section, said the Gulf is a very active oil and gas province for the federal agency, which is responsible for overseeing oil and gas development on the outer continental shelf.
“At any given time there’s about 5,500 leases out there and there’s roughly 33,000 miles of pipeline on the sea floor on the outer continental shelf. ... We’ve got about 22,000 people working offshore and another 22,000 onshore waiting to rotate offshore,” Goeke said. “It’s a very significant and a very large effort that happens in the Gulf of Mexico.”
BOEM breaks up approved lease areas into 9-square-mile “blocks” and auctions them off to companies seeking to harvest oil and gas. The winning company then enters into a legally binding contract with the agency, which allows them to explore the area and set up infrastructure to harvest the natural resources.
The two proposed lease sale areas include a small portion of BOEM’s Eastern Planning area, which includes the Gulf of Mexico area off the coast of Florida, and a large portion of the Central Planning area, which spans offshore from the Florida/Alabama border to the Texas/Louisiana border. The areas are scheduled to be sold in 2016 and are roughly 150 miles from Panama City Beach at the closest point.
The Central Planning lease sale area includes 7,544 unleased blocks, or about 40.4 million unleased acres, capable of producing between 460 million and 890 million barrels of oil, and between 1.94 and 3.90 trillion cubic feet of gas.
The much smaller Eastern Planning lease sale area includes just 134 unleased blocks, or about 465,000 acres, with oil production expected to yield up to 70 million barrels, and natural gas yield estimated between 0 and 0.16 cubic feet.
To develop the environmental impact study, Goeke said BOEM must consider every facet of oil and gas leasing that could potentially impact the surrounding marine environment.
“We have a fairly extensive list of things that may potentially be impacting factors,” Goeke said, referencing potential disturbances from seismic surveying, drilling, air emissions, trash and debris, oil spills and more. “We take that list of impacting factors and we consider each one of those as we move through the various natural resources that we’re going to examine in our” environmental study.
BOEM will hold similar scoping meetings in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana this month.
BOEM is early in the process and must wrap up the public comment period before developing a draft environmental impact study. A second public comment period will take place before the document is considered for adoption.
WANT TO COMMENT?
Those interested in commenting on the proposed environmental impact study and lease sales can submit comments by email to cpa241-epa226@boem.gov or visit newsherald.com for a link. Comments must be submitted by July 21.