The potential impact of the President’s oil moratorium threatens to exacerbate the devastation our region is already experiencing as a result of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf.  With the possible loss of over 20,000 jobs,  the Business Council has been a forceful and consistent voice in opposing the moratorium and providing recommendations for ways to avert this additional crisis including establishment of the Move Forward Now coalition of business and community organizations  and by taking a leadership role in the multi-state Gulf Citizens United coalition.

Congressional Briefing

Additionally, the Business Council also coordinated a briefing of several Congressman including Mike Pence (IN), Charlie Dent (PA),Pete Olson (TX), and Steve Scalise (LA), bringing together oil industry executives and other businesspeople affected by the moratorium.  The panel included Don Briggs, President, LOGA, Boysie Bollinger, Bollinger Shipyards, Dr. Joseph Mason from LSU, Pete Gerica, Gerica Seafood and President of the Lake Pontchartrain Commercial Fisherman’s Association, Bob Brown from the Business Council and Leslie Bertucci with R&D Enterprises.

These efforts were featured recently in New Orleans’ Times-Picayune (click to read the story).

The primary messages for the Congressmen were:

• Lift the moratorium ASAP. It’s crippling the drilling industry in the Gulf itself along with all of the ancillary businesses and jobs that support it.  The suffering is local, it is widespread and it is deeply painful.
• Do not strangle exploration & drilling efforts with new, overly burdensome and confusing legislation and regulations. It’s becoming more clear every day that the problem here was a tragic combination of questionable and unsafe drilling practices by BP and lax oversight by MMS.  The industry can and will take prudent steps to insure the safest and most reliable drilling practices possible.  And the new BOEMRE must surely have a new and more rigorous oversight regime by now.  There is no need to over-study, over-legislate and over-regulate.
• Invite meaningful industry input into the president’s commission review and related hearings. With all due respect to their intellectual capacity and professional accomplishments, not a single one of the 7 commission appointees has direct experience in oil and/or gas exploration.  And, while it is encouraging that one of their senior staffers, Richard Sears, has 33 years experience at Shell (VP, International Exploration and Deepwater Technical Evaluation) he is not sitting in one of the policy seats.