WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to announce Thursday that he is extending the moratorium on permits to drill new deepwater wells for six more months and will delay or cancel specific projects off the coasts of Alaska and Virginia and in the western Gulf of Mexico, a White House official said.
Mr. Obama, who will discuss the decisions at a midday White House news conference, is taking the actions in response to the initial 30-day safety review of offshore drilling ordered after a BP rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men and opening a gusher of oil that has yet to be stopped.
The latest moves come amid deepening frustration and criticism of the administration’s handling of the crisis. The president’s order is intended to halt further permits for new wells for six months, delay planned exploration in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the coast of Alaska, cancel the August lease sale in the western Gulf and cancel the lease sale off the coast of Virginia, the White House official said.
The Virginia lease sale had drawn environmental concerns and objections from the Defense Department. The Alaska project will be delayed for six months while a new presidential commission studies how to regulate offshore drilling.
Mr. Obama will also announce standards to strengthen oversight of the drilling industry and enhance safety as the commission opens its inquiry. The commission will be led by former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and William K. Reilly, who was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under the first President Bush.
The effort to stem further drilling represents a marked turnaround for Mr. Obama, who just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion had proposed to expand offshore oil exploration as a response to the nation’s continuing need for new energy sources. But it reflects the volatile and rapidly shifting political environment as Mr. Obama struggles to find a way to demonstrate leadership even as efforts to stop and clean up the spill falter.
After his news conference on Thursday, Mr. Obama plans to fly to Louisiana on Friday to look more closely into the efforts being made to counter the leak, his second trip to the region since the explosion. Critics who call the disaster Mr. Obama’s Hurricane Katrina point out that President George W. Bush traveled to the region more frequently in the early weeks after the hurricane that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005.
Karl Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff during Hurricane Katrina, argued the case in his Wall Street Journal column on Thursday morning. “Could this be Mr. Obama’s Katrina? It could be even worse,” he wrote. Mr. Rove recalled Mr. Obama’s criticism of Mr. Bush’s handling of the hurricane and tried to throw it back at him. “Mr. Obama’s failure to lead in cleaning up the spill could lead voters to echo his complaint in Katrina’s aftermath: ‘I wish that the federal government had been up to the task.’ ”
The White House has rejected any comparisons to Hurricane Katrina and has bombarded reporters with daily briefings and updates on all the activity taken by the administration in response to the spill.
“I would say that his level of frustration is very high and that every moment that that hole is not plugged the president has a deep level of concern,” Bill Burton, his spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday. “And obviously this has been an all-hands-on-deck approach to what has been a pretty big catastrophe and he’s going to continue to do everything that we can and bring in the best and brightest minds to figure out different ways that we can address this until the hole is plugged and until we’ve mitigated the environmental disaster in and on the water.”
How sweeping the president’s new orders will be remains to be seen. After he ordered his initial moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers were granted, according to records. Since the April 20 explosion, the records show, federal regulators granted at least 19 environmental waivers for Gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits. The administration has said that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells, not to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.
A poll released by CBS News this week underscored the growing public impatience with the administration’s handling of the crisis. Forty-five percent of those surveyed disapproved of the way the administration has responded to the oil spill, compared with 35 percent who approved. Fully 70 percent disapproved of BP’s handling of the situation. At the same time, support for offshore drilling has cratered. While 64 percent favored increased drilling in 2008, just 45 percent do now, according to CBS, while those who say the risks are too great increased from 28 percent two years ago to 46 percent.
One major oil company, Shell Oil, had been hoping to begin a controversial exploratory drilling project this summer in the Arctic Ocean, which the new restrictions would put on hold.
Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska and a staunch supporter of drilling in the Arctic, said he was informed of the new restrictions by the Interior Department. Mr. Begich said he was frustrated because the decision “will cause more delays and higher costs for domestic oil and gas production to meet the nation’s energy needs.”
“The Gulf of Mexico tragedy has highlighted the need for much stronger oversight and accountability of oil companies working offshore, but Shell has updated its plans at the administration’s request and made significant investments to address the concerns raised by the Gulf spill,” Senator Begich said in a statement. “They make an effective case that we can safely explore for oil and gas this summer in the Arctic.”
In his statement, Mr. Begich argued that the administration’s decision would cost Alaska jobs and money, and force the country “to export more dollars and import more oil from some unfriendly places, jeopardizing our economic and national security.”
Mr. Begich has been pushing for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a protected 19-million-acre area along the northeastern coast of Alaska, for some time. Earlier this month, he wrote a joint letter with two other Alaska congressmen urging the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to consider oil and gas exploration in a special, 1.5 million-acre section of the refuge called the “10-02” area, named after the section of a bill that expanded the refuge three decades ago.
“New technology can now facilitate both a better understanding of the oil and gas reserves within the 10-02 area as well as enable more environmentally responsible development,” he stated in the joint letter earlier this month. “Directional drilling techniques would allow extraction of oil and gas from some of the 10-02 area with no surface disturbance.”
