Florida lawmakers eye oil drilling permits
Amid a legal battle over an oil and gas drilling effort near Northwest Florida's Apalachicola River, state House and Senate panels approved Tuesday proposals to shield environmentally sensitive areas from drilling.
The House bill (HB 1143) would go further than the Senate bill, including calling for a drilling ban within 10 miles of the state's three National Estuarine Research Reserves. Both bills also would create a 'balancing test' that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection would have to consider in deciding whether to issue drilling permits near water bodies.
One of the areas that would be off-limits would be within 10 miles of the Apalachicola National Estuarine Research Reserve, around the river and Franklin County's Apalachicola Bay. House bill sponsor Jason Shoaf, R-Port St. Joe, compared concerns about ecological damage from drilling in the region to the effects of the massive 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the gulf coast.
'The oil (from the Deepwater Horizon spill) never got to us,' Shoaf, whose district includes Franklin County, said. 'But it killed our economy anyway, just the threat of it.'
Lawmakers are considering the issue after the Department of Environmental Protection last year approved a draft permit for the Louisiana-based Clearwater Land & Minerals Fla. to drill an exploratory well in an unincorporated part of Calhoun County, near the Apalachicola River.
The environmental group Apalachicola Riverkeeper challenged the draft permit, and the case is pending at the state Division of Administrative Hearings.
The House Natural Resources & Disasters Subcommittee on Tuesday unanimously approved the House bill, which received support from several people in the seafood industry.
Shoaf said after the meeting that the bill would not stop the draft permit that the department issued last year for exploratory drilling. But he said it would prevent additional permits that would be needed to commercially produce and sell oil from the site.
The other two National Estuarine Research Reserves that would be affected by the House bill are the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve near St. Augustine and the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve near Naples.
Eric Hamilton, a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, told the House panel that his organization is concerned that the 10-mile restriction around National Estuarine Research Reserves might go too far and about mineral rights.
While relatively unusual for Florida, companies have long drilled for oil around the Santa Rosa County community of Jay and in parts of Southwest Florida. The planned project in Calhoun County is at a site that was previously permitted for drilling but was never drilled.
The state and federal governments have taken steps to protect the Apalachicola River and Apalachicola Bay. They are part of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system, which starts in northern Georgia, crosses into Alabama and ends in Apalachicola Bay on the Gulf Coast.
Environmentalists contend that the planned drilling project threatens the river and would be in the river's floodplain.
The House and Senate bills include identical proposals that would require the Department of Environmental Protection, in drilling-permit decisions about sites within one mile of shorelines or other bodies of water, to 'balance the measures in place to protect the natural resources with the potential harm to the natural resources.'
'This balancing test should assess the potential impact of an accident or a blowout on the natural resources of such bodies of water and shore areas, including ecological functions and any water quality impacts,' the bills say.
The Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday approved the Senate version (SB 1300).
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