Oil Shale News

By: Cara Bayles

From: Daily Comet

BILOXI, Miss. — Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum tapped a chunk of oil shale against the podium at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum and Convention Center.

“Thanks to the Marcellus shale and the Utica shale, we’re seeing our economy growing again, and we’ve seen a tremendous reduction in natural-gas prices,” the former Pennsylvania senator told the audience of hundreds. “It’s pretty remarkable to think that you can get oil out of this, but through that hydraulic fracturing you can.”

The show-and-tell moment occurred during the first-ever Gulf Coast Energy Summit, organized by the Thibodaux-based Gulf Economic Survival Team and the Consumer Energy Alliance.

The conference also drew Republican contender and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, as well as oil, natural-gas, manufacturing and political leaders. It was held on the eve of today’s GOP presidential primaries in Mississippi and Alabama.

“We’re a bipartisan organization, but the timing does allow us to make this a cornerstone issue of the election,” said Lori LeBlanc, executive director of the Survival Team.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, considered the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination with 454 delegates, was also invited to speak, according to LeBlanc, but he was campaigning Monday in Alabama.

LeBlanc said U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was also invited but declined to attend.

The Survival Team is a group of local energy businesses that formed in response to the six-month moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The moratorium, which was followed by a more-thorough but slower federal permitting process, was part of the Obama administration’s reaction to 2010’s Gulf oil spill.

During his speech Monday, Gingrich called the permitting process “an absurdity” and added that safety inspections for rigs need to be streamlined and modernized.

“Deepwater Horizon in part is a function of a bureaucracy that didn’t even know how to deal with rigs or doing things under those kind of pressures,” he said.

He added he would replace the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with “a brand new Environmental Solutions Agency.”

“It is very clear the EPA has evolved into an anti-jobs, anti-business, anti-local government institution,” he said.

Santorum equated climate science with political science and scoffed at the notion that carbon dioxide could have a detrimental effect on the environment.

“Tell that to a plant,” he said, adding that he had always supported the energy industry while his opponents have wavered by supporting cap-and-trade measures.

“When it was tough to stand up and say you were for energy production, when it was tough to say, ‘that stuff in the ground is an asset, not a liability,’ I stood up and said the science was bogus,” he said.

In this fall’s presidential election, energy has already become a key political issue, with ties to the economy, states’ rights to self-regulate, foreign policy and national security.

The candidates criticized the Obama administration for not supporting the Keystone XL pipeline that would send Canadian oil to Texas refineries, the lengthy permitting process for offshore drilling and the president’s interest in green energy.

Gingrich said the general election will be a choice between $2.50 for a gallon of gasoline or $10 per gallon and a “fantasy” of creating renewable energy from algae.

White House officials have joined the fray, and on Monday in Washington, D.C., Salazar said the administration’s actions have cut oil imports by 10 percent compared to a year ago and that domestic production is at an eight-year high. Salazar said the numbers represent “a dramatic achievement and one that we are very proud of.”

But locals say offshore drilling in the Gulf has still not recovered from the moratorium that ended 17 months ago. LeBlanc said she hopes Monday’s event will highlight local industry’s struggle.

Among speakers was Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph, who said the drilling ban and subsequent permit slowdown had a “devastating” effect on her community.

“With all the speeches you’ve heard today, I can bring it on home for you. The energy industry is part and parcel of our community,” she said. “Our country is thirsting for energy, and the folks down here along the Gulf Coast know how to produce it.”