France suspends Guiana offshore oil drilling

New French Environment Minister Nicole Bricq said Wednesday that oil exploration, including a project by Anglo-Dutch group Shell off the coast of French Guiana, had been suspended until further notice. "I am starting over again with all the licenses" for offshore oil exploration, "in total agreement" with Arnaud Montebourg, the French minister for re-industrialisation, Bricq told a press conference. "I am starting over again with Shell's licenses in Guiana," she said, confirming a report in the French daily Le Monde's Thursday edition. Bricq was to meet Wednesday with Patrick Romeo, head of Shell France, which had expected French authorisation on Thursday to begin drilling test wells off the coast of French Guiana, an overseas French department on the northeast coast of South America. Shell holds a "Guiana Maritime" permit to look for oil with partners that include the French oil group Total, Tullow Oil and Northpet Investments. The permit was issued in 2001, has been extended three times, and is valid until 2016. Shell is responsible for the drilling and was waiting for authorisation from French prefectures to begin. Bricq and Montebourg said in a joint statement later that the Shell project "insufficiently ... took into account environmental problems." Bricq had said earlier: "We are very keen to protect marine life and the environment, and we have no guarantees regarding them." The move by France's new Socialist administration also comes ahead of an environmental summit in Brazil dubbed Rio+20. Shell France was apparently caught unawares by the decision, and a spokesman said: "this is really very surprising if we consider the regional support for this project in Guiana." He stressed that Shell's oil exploration plans "represented a major opportunity for France, and for French Guiana in particular." The Shell spokesman said the oil group had just been waiting for technical details to be settled to complete a drilling authorisation the company said it obtained on May 22. "This project was not started yesterday, we have had commitments for months, with meetings and public consultations, and everything that has been done went beyond regulatory standards," the spokesman said. Bricq had said last week that she wanted to bring legislation on petroleum exploration and exploitation into line with that which exists already for mining and the environment. But the Shell spokesman said: "We fail to see how a revision of mining laws could interfere with our project, we thought that everything was on track." But the ministers said France's "excessively liberal" legislation failed to ensure that the country and local communities get the funds they should. "The government is not calling into question exploration of Guianian deposits, but want to fundamentally reform" legislation that governs the sector. Bricq had earlier said the suspension of the exploration permit was taken so the government can conduct a full legislative review. Local environmental protection groups quickly voiced satisfaction with the French decision. "At Guiana Nature Environnement we are satisfied to see that the new government is taking things seriously," spokesman Christian Roudgie told AFP. He pointed out that there was "still no safety net" that would effectively force application "of the polluter-pays principle in the event of a major catastrophe like the black tides" caused by a BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. France decided on May 8 to publish the list of oil exploration permits for all French territories in a bid for "transparency," Bricq said. She vowed to also "look very closely" at a 2011 law that banned the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing to explore for oil and natural gas deposits, without completely rejecting its use.