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Many people are wondering about a federal judge's ruling that is preventing the U.S. government, in the person of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, from imposing a moratorium on permitting new oil wells or allowing wells in progress to be completed in waters deeper than 500 feet.

The lawsuit was filed by Hornbeck Offshore Services, an operator of deepwater supply boats. It was joined by a number of offshore service companies, and an "amicus" brief was filed by the state of Louisiana. A similar suit in Texas has been filed by Diamond Offshore, a major contract driller worldwide.

The moratorium would suspend all pending current or approved drilling operations for new deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Pacific for six months, regardless of the safety records of the operators and drilling companies performing necessary activities and regardless of the likely economic damage caused to the Gulf Coast economies.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman points out that the government issued the notice of the moratorium without meeting the minimum requirements set out in the law. He cited two separate laws: the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

His ruling explains that the government report and subsequent memoranda make no effort to establish any irreparable harm to the government that would warrant a suspension of operations. The report and the follow-up memos do not provide a timetable for how long it would take to implement any safety recommendations.

The government also didn't provide analysis, required by law, concerning the economic damage likely to be caused by the moratorium. It made no differentiation between shallow and deepwater wells (the 500-foot boundary was added after the Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition pointed out that shallow-water drilling rigs, called jack-ups, use blowout preventers that are mounted at the surface, not at the sea floor).

The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act is the main law dealing with the offshore exploration and production sector. The act mandates consideration of the economic, social and environmental values of resources contained in the Outer Continental Shelf.

The other law mentioned in his ruling is the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides that agency actions may be set aside by a judge only if they are "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion or not otherwise in accordance with the law." The secretary provided no evidence that he had balanced his concern for environmental safety with the stated policy of making leases available for development or that he considered any alternatives to a blanket moratorium on all drilling.

In effect, the six-month suspension will become a five-year-plus cessation of drilling activity with all of the concomitant problems of regional depression, increased oil prices, greater import dependency, increased risk of spills -- because additional tankers would be bringing more crude or refined products into the U.S., and tankers have a much worse safety record than do drilling rigs and domestic production systems -- and an ever-worsening balance of payments problem. Oh, by the way, the coastal restoration fund, predicated on the receipt of royalty payments from deep water production, will also be history.

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Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
signing off