Retired Joint Pipeline Office geologist Joe Dygas gives us this O&G Journal tip and editorial remark:  Oil and natural gas are indispensable in a growing world energy market, and Royal Dutch Shell PLC plans to make gas roughly half of its total production by 2012, its chief executive officer said on Oct. 8.   “This is not merely a shift in our portfolio. Increasing natural gas production and transportation by liquefying it and shipping the LNG to global markets means that more natural gas will be available to displace coal as the fuel for power plants,” Peter Voser said in an address at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. (Dygas’ Comment: Note Shell’s production to be 50% gas by 2012. Industry is clearly ramping up its gas production both in US [lower 48] and overseas. Alaska’ s politicians fail to understand the competition they are dealing with while they waste time.)

IBD Debunks NOAA’s OCS Advice

Environment: With much of the world still feeling the sting from last year’s oil shock, a group of federal scientists is encouraging Washington to limit offshore drilling. Its counsel would best be ignored.  

Citing harmful effects on marine life and oil spills in the Arctic, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are asking the Interior Department to "drastically reduce plans to open the coast to offshore oil and gas drilling," the Los Angeles Times is reporting.  (See our stories yesterday, below.)  Their concerns are justified. Marine life is affected by offshore oil production, and spills do happen. The issue is how and to what degree. If the NOAA scientists would step back, they would notice a couple of points that are germane to the debate.  First, the impact of offshore drilling on marine life has hardly brought on a fish and fowl holocaust. Earlier in this decade, a Florida oceanographer working for the Interior Department studied the impact of relatively new offshore oil drilling in the Arctic off of Alaska. He did not discover what he expected he would.  "We found early in the process that impacts to the environment from offshore drilling were minimal," said John Trefry, a marine and environmental systems professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. "In fact, the entire offshore area was near-pristine."  Follow-up monitoring by Trefry’s group found "no evidence of significant impacts."  Other research has found that offshore oil rigs bring not disaster for marine life but health. Four years ago, the Washington Post reported that Paul Sammarco, a marine biologist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, surveyed abandoned drilling rigs and discovered that they had "spawned lush marine habitats that are home to a profusion of rare corals and 10,000 to 30,000 fish each."