West Coast senators move to bar new Pacific drilling

WASHINGTON — Senators from California, Oregon and Washington united Thursday behind a plan to ban new offshore drilling along the Pacific Coast in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Their push, which joins a similar House effort with the backing of 20 Democrats, could gain traction in Congress as public outrage grows about the April 20 explosion on an offshore drilling rig near Louisiana that left 11 workers dead and unleashed an oil spill that threatens the Gulf Coast.

The Pacific Coast senators were unified to “make sure that there will never be offshore oil and gas drilling off the West Coast of our nation,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “We know this can happen again,” Boxer said, while gesturing to a poster-size photo of boats spraying water on the flame-engulfed Deepwater Horizon rig.

Boxer's bill would bar the federal government from issuing any leases for exploration, development or production of oil or natural gas in any area off the West Coast.

The measure would apply only to new leases in federal waters. It would not bar oil companies from expanding drilling on current leases and it would not apply to drilling decisions within state waters, which typically extend three miles out from the shore.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., linked the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the 1969 blowout of a well near Santa Barbara, which triggered a nationwide backlash against offshore drilling. That was “a seminal moment for us,” Feinstein said. And now, “the BP disaster has shown that . . . By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY

President Barack Obama announced plans in March to expand offshore drilling in new areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Although he specifically ruled out new federal drilling leases off the Pacific Coast and in some areas near Alaska, nothing in federal law limits exploration in the region.

That's because Congress allowed a decades-old statutory moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific shores to expire in 2008, amid soaring oil prices. A statutory ban on drilling near the Florida Gulf Coast is set to expire in 2022.

Right now, the only safeguard is Obama's assurance that new federal drilling will be barred in the Pacific, Boxer said. “There is no permanent protection,” she said.

The West Coast lawmakers — including Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. — said they would try to advance the legislation as part of any energy bill that moves through the Senate. One prime candidate: a climate change and energy measure that was unveiled Wednesday.

But that climate measure would only give states the power to bar drilling 75 miles off their shores — farther than the typical three-mile barrier, but still far less than the unlimited, permanent ban the West Coast senators seek.

Any change to the climate change bill's offshore drilling proposals threatens to undermine the entire measure, which already faces long odds in the Senate.

Drilling advocates in Congress have warned that any move to shut off offshore production could jeopardize the U.S. economy and heighten the nation's reliance on foreign sources of oil.

“We do not want to have people have to import more and more foreign oil,” said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis. “Whether we like it or not, the only real place to find significant additional oil deposits in meaningful quantities is in the outer continental shelf.”

Nationwide, support for offshore drilling still remains strong, despite the Gulf spill. Six in 10 Americans back expanded ocean drilling, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday.

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