VIRGINIA OIL LEASE SALE PROCEEDING

OIL ONLINE:

The scheduled 2012 lease sale offshore Virginia will proceed, even without the environmental impact studies necessary to allow oil & gas exploration in place, the head of the Minerals Management Service said on 14 April 2010.

Liz BirnbaumMMS director Liz Birnbaum said the sale - the first on the US Atlantic outer continental shelf (OCS) since the lifting of a decades-old ban on offshore drilling in 2008 -- would help gauge interest among companies in the exploration potential of a stretch of the Atlantic from Georgia to Delaware that the Obama administration would open to drilling under the MMS's proposed 2012-2017 five-year leasing plan.

'In some ways, this lease sale was devised to be sort of a test sale,' Birnbaum said before delivering a speech at the Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference in Seattle, Washington. 'It's a very limited-size sale.'

AN IMPORTANT TEST. STAY TUNED...