Citing gulf oil spill, Obama to suspend Arctic drilling

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/27/94885/citing-gulf-oil-spill-obama-to.html

Posted on Thursday, May 27, 2010

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Thursday will suspend planned exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska until at least 2011, a casualty of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The suspension will be part of a report that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will give to President Barack Obama, who's likely to address the suspension as well as other proposals stemming from Salazar's report, at a White House news conference Thursday.

The move will stop Shell from drilling five wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off northern Alaska weeks before it had hoped to start work, an administration official told McClatchy Newspapers.

The move will stop for now a controversial expansion of oil drilling in a part of the world that could hold vast stores of oil and natural gas, but which environmentalists warn would come at great risk.

due to the platforms getting frozen in and then drifting with the ice. There's one, not sure which country owns it and I've lost the link where I found it, where they'd already supspended for now due to that and the complexity of drilling a transverse well.