GNO Inc. Monitoring Drilling Permits

By Eileen Fleming

New Orleans, La. – GNO president Michael Hecht says about half as many permits are being issued by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for shallow-water drilling. Those rigs were not included in the drilling moratorium for deepwater operations, but are lagging behind numbers issued for the same time last year, and that's a concern.

"There are 1,000 jobs that are supported by a deepwater rig and hundreds of jobs supported by shallow-water rigs. So at the end of the day, if these rigs aren't allowed to go back into operation at some reasonable rate, we will see job loss., which is going to be exacerbated by the fact that the BP remediation effort is going to be ending."

Hecht says GNO will check the government's numbers and update findings every two weeks to monitor any trends that emerge.
For WWNO, I'm Eileen Fleming