Energy advocate pleased with offshore survey proposal

A free-market energy and environmental policy advocate argues that the lessons learned from previous environmental incidents should encourage offshore drilling, not discourage it.

“When these worst-case events happen, we learn a lot about them,” said Robert L. Bradley, Jr., CEO of the Institute for Energy Research. “BP, actually, has suffered more than $65 billion of costs in relation to their accident. There’s a lot of self-interest for oil and gas companies to do the right thing, to produce oil and gas and not leak it.”

Given that right now, OPEC still largely has control of enough of the oil market to change gas prices in the U.S., getting increased supply would seem to be a net positive.

“Keep in mind that Americans consume more than 20 million barrels of oil every day,” said Bradley. “We need to think about future supply, not only present supply.”

A proposal in the works from the Trump administration to inventory potential supplies offshore in the Atlantic is something Bradley is looking forward to.

“These areas, we believe, hold huge quantities of oil and gas,” said Bradley. “We don’t know how much. They need to be inventoried. The Trump administration and the new Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt are working to allow inventory of the supplies, what we think is there. It is about a five to ten year process.”

Since 2010, the American Petroleum Institute has published over 100 new and revised exploration and production standards.