Slide 5 of 18
Notes:
- The Minerals Management Service has been and continues to be very concerned about helping to meet America’s need for natural gas. In fact, we have taken a number of opportunities to sit down and work with industry to develop incentives to help stimulate natural gas production.
- One of the most important things we do is to work cooperatively with the various States to evaluate the issues surrounding offshore energy gas production. So, we recently asked the Secretary’s OCS Policy Committee to form a subcommittee on natural gas. The Policy Committee comprises representatives from all the U.S. coastal states, industry, the environmental community, and other Federal Agencies. We anticipate that this will help ensure we are on top of all the current issues relative to producing natural gas from the OCS.
- In the past, most of our incentives focused on increasing oil production. For example, the 1995 Deepwater Royalty Relief Act allowed us to forego the royalty payment for certain amounts of production from new deepwater leases to help develop an infrastructure in very deep waters.
- This led to an explosion in the number of leases in water depths greater than 200 meters. Since 1996, industry has acquired about 3,300 new lease blocks in over 200 meters of water. This has led to more than 100 discoveries and 35 deepwater fields have gone on production.
