Interior issues order to speed drilling permits for federal land

N.M. oil, gas officials praise move; environmentalists condemn it as handout

The U.S. Department of the Interior, intent on boosting oil and gas production on federal lands, issued an order Thursday designed to speed up the permitting process for drilling.

The move could have a big impact in New Mexico, where federal offices overseeing energy development in two of the nation’s key basins have hundreds of pending permit applications.

Officials with New Mexico’s oil and gas industry praised the order, an effort they say could boost funding for public education and other government services as the state looks to shore up its finances.

“Today’s announcement will help us to more fully realize our energy potential,” Ryan Flynn, head of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said in a

statement. Flynn testified before Congress last week on the delays and other challenges faced by the industry — and their effects on a state that heavily relies on revenues from oil and gas production.

But environmental groups criticized the move as yet another unnecessary handout to oil and gas companies, which have considerable access to federal lands.

“Fast-tracking oil and gas exploitation on our public lands is wrong for America,” Sharon Buccino, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s land and wildlife program, said in a statement.

Coming on the heels of the Trump administration’s selfstyled Energy Week in late June, Secretary Ryan Zinke’s order is its latest effort to loosen restrictions on the fossil fuel industry. The White House is pushing for more domestic oil, natural gas and coal production so that the United States can become a net energy exporter as part of President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

The Interior Department said the average approval time for a drilling permit during the last fiscal year under the Obama administration was 257 days, though the most recent statistics suggest it was 220 days. The result of that approval pace, according to the agency, was that the Bureau of Land Management had 2,802 drilling permit applications pending when Trump took office.

That includes nearly 390 pending applications in southeastern New Mexico, where activity has been on the rise, federal officials said, and another 152 applications in northwestern New Mexico.

Zinke said the aim of his order is to untangle the bureaucratic knot so the BLM can review permit applications within 30 days, as mandated by statute. He also ordered oil and gas lease sales be held in each state every quarter.

“The Department of the Interior will be a better neighbor,” Zinke said in a statement.

A number of factors account for the current delay in permitting, but one of the major reasons was that until recently companies filed via paper forms. The BLM announced in December that it was moving to a default electronic system, which it estimated would cut the average processing time to 115 days for 90 percent of applications.

The vast majority of all BLM sites also lack archaeological and historic data, meaning they have to be physically surveyed before the agency grants a permit.

In a recent interview, Acting BLM Director Michael Nedd said the agency had been examining “how do we make certain that process doesn’t take so long” to ensure that the administration was following through on its commitment to promote domestic energy production.

The vast majority of onshore oil and gas production takes place on private and state land. Federal land accounts for only 4.8 percent and 11.3 percent of total U.S. crude oil and natural gas production respectively, according to data from Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue.

Erik Milito, who directs the American Petroleum Institute’s upstream and industry operations, said in an interview that it often takes as little as 10 to 30 days to get a state permit to drill. If the federal government could shorten its time frame in a similar manner, he added, it would be “much easier to invest in those properties.”

Environmentalists counter that oil and gas firms let leases they already hold go to waste, often preventing those parcels from being used for camping or other recreational activities. According to the Wilderness Society, 12.7 million acres of public land of the 27 million acres currently under lease were in production during fiscal 2016.

Moreover, 7,950 approved permits were waiting to be used for drilling by the end of that fiscal year, Kate Macgregor, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, told Congress last week.

“It’s not clear why processing more permits will do anything to produce more energy on public lands,” Nada Culver, a senior director at the Wilderness Society, said after Zinke’s announcement. “It seems to me to be the same message we keep hearing, but it doesn’t match up with the switch on the ground.”