On the recordApril 26, 2012
The drilling is taking place on State-owned property or private property, but other lands other than Federal lands. If it wasn't for that, drilling would be down in the United States. If we go back to the Gulf of Mexico, the same situation we have in the Gulf of Mexico has been ever since the BP incident. Permitting is taking too long. It takes a record amount of days, sometimes months, to issue a permit in the deep water and in the shallow water. The shallow water guys operate with a very small amount of capital. They can't stay and wait around for the government to make a decision on a permit or not, so they aren't able to drill. In the deep water, those deepwater wells, those rigs, they cost $100,000 a day whether they're operating or they're sitting there, and that's why some of them have left the Gulf of Mexico to never return. They've gone down to South America; they've gone to off the coast of Africa, to drill where countries are friendlier to the drilling safely off of their coast.
