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Monmouth Beach, NJ --- U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) today denounced the inclusion of a provision in a must-pass appropriations bill that would allow offshore natural gas drilling as close as three miles off the U.S. coast.
At a press conference in Monmouth Beach, the New Jersey congressman said he will join a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Florida, New Jersey and California to offer an amendment to strip the environmentally harmful provision from the bill when it comes to the House floor for a vote later this week.
The provision was added to the Fiscal Year (FY) 2007 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill last week in the House Appropriations Committee by U.S. Rep. John Peterson (R-PA). The provision, which eliminates a longstanding moratorium on natural gas drilling from three to 200 miles off the coast in the outer continental shelf, passed the committee by a vote of 37 to 25.
"This offshore drilling provision poses the biggest threat to New Jersey's beaches this year, and is the latest attempt by oil-thirsty lawmakers to gain access to our shoreline," Pallone said. "Supporters of this harmful provision are under the false impression that you can drill for natural gas without striking oil. A spill would devastate our beach and marine environment as well our state's tourism economy. We've beaten back these drilling efforts before, and we'll fight again this week to replicate our past success to protect the Jersey shore."
The New Jersey congressman said Peterson and others are wrong when they claim offshore natural gas drilling is environmentally safe. Both the Minerals Management Service and the American Petroleum Institute concluded that there is no such thing as gas-only drilling. Pallone said it's impossible for geologists to determine if a drilling company is going to hit gas rather than oil when they begin drilling into the sea floor.
Pallone said there is also no major prize of natural gas along the Atlantic outer continental shelf (OCS). The Atlantic OCS region only contains 28 trillion cubic feet of gas, compared to almost 344 trillion cubic feet that is already open for exploration in the Gulf Coast and in parts of Alaska. Pallone said that 81-percent of the available oil and gas is under the parts of the OCS that are already open.
"Our coastlines are simply too important to be sacrificed for some small amount of gas," Pallone continued. "That's why we've had a moratorium in place to protect the outer continental shelf for more than two decades."
Last year, Pallone re-introduced legislation that places a permanent ban on drilling off the Jersey Shore and all North and Mid-Atlantic states from Maine to Virginia. The "COAST (Clean Ocean and Safe Tourism) Anti-Drilling Act'' would permanently extend an existing moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the Jersey Shore. The moratorium has been in effect since 1982.
Pallone said that allowing offshore drilling could devastate New Jersey's tourism economy, which is heavily dependent on clean ocean water and beaches. Beach tourism supports nearly 500,000 jobs and indirectly generates $16.6 billion in wages and $5.5 billion in state tax revenue.
The New Jersey congressman was joined at today's press conference by New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Commissioner Lisa Jackson, Monmouth Beach Commissioner Kimberly Guadagno, Clean Ocean Action Executive Director Cindy Zipf, Tim Dillingham of the American Littoral Society and Andrew Mencinsky of the Surfers' Environmental Alliance. |
