Here is a great article speaking to the frustration in the oil business as to why they can't get permits granted to get the oil out of the ground and into the refineries.
Frustration and Hope as Oil Drilling Regulator Remakes Itself
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN BRODERIn Sunday’s Times, we assessed the Interior Department’s progress in revamping the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-ridden agency responsible for regulating offshore oil and gas drilling and collecting royalties from oil development on public lands.
The article noted that the agency has a new name (the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement), a new director (Michael R. Bromwich) and a new focus on worker safety and environmental stewardship.
It should come as no surprise that oil and gas industry executives have plenty of criticism for the new agency, now that the federal government has tried to tighten controls over offshore drilling in the wake of the disastrous BP oil spill in the gulf last April. After all, the bureau has been slow to grant permission to the industry to get back to work in the Gulf of Mexico.
But many of the criticisms and suggestions made by the industry are similar or identical to those of environmentalists, who rarely agree with the drillers on anything. Oil and gas executives say they need an effective agency, one that is well-financed and has well-trained inspectors. An inadequate agency is only going to delay drilling into the future, say oil and gas executives.
Most of the executives also praise the Obama administration for separating the inspection and revenue-raising functions of the agency, which led to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.
“We are certainly happy at having them out there and looking at us,” said Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil, one of the major drillers in the deepwater areas of the gulf. That may seem like a funny thing for an oil executive to say, but without the inspections, new drilling can’t go forward.
“They need more human capacity to get this work done,” Mr. Odum said. “There is already a backlog of permit applications and that is only going to get worse.” Part of the solution, Mr. Odum said, is adequate funding for the agency, something that is not assured at a time when federal budgets are tight.
Jim Noe, senior vice president for Hercules Offshore, an oil and gas drilling company, said it was vital that the bureau is financed sufficiently to increase the starting salaries of agency inspectors. Substandard inspectors cannot possibly understand the sophisticated technologies required to drill in thousands of feet of water. “How do you attract engineers? You have to pay,” he said.
But aside from the slow rate of the permitting, the biggest complaint among the executives is that it has been hard for them to understand and comply with the agency’s new drilling rules, in part because industry executives no longer have the easy access to regulators they once did.
read more @ http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/frustration-and-hope-as-oil-drilling-regulator-remakes-itself/
How about this, let's drill here in America and get American's back to work! Now that's the All Right Idea!