The Obama administration today released a final environmental review of its recently completed five-year plan to guide offshore oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico.

The final programmatic environmental impact statement released by the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management provides a big-picture review of potential concerns likely to crop up as the administration conducts lease sales in the central and western Gulf scheduled in its 2012-17 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program.

"This EIS is a crucial step in supporting our ability to make well-informed, science-based decisions regarding offshore oil and gas activity in the Gulf of Mexico," BOEM Director Tommy Beaudreau said in a statement. "The Gulf of Mexico is extremely important to the energy future of the United States, and offshore oil and gas activity there must be done safely and with safeguards for the environment."

The five-year program also calls for lease sales in Alaska, but that aspect of the program will be analyzed separately, a BOEM spokesman said.

While "establishing a schedule of lease sales by itself will have no direct effects on most resources on the OCS," the PEIS says, regulators considered historical data and assumptions about future activity to assess potential impacts from oil spills, effects on climate change and other factors, according to the document.

"Conclusions for most analyses generally indicate the ability of most affected resources to recover from impacts that could result from oil and gas development following leasing," according to the PEIS summary.

Subsequent lease sales and operations plans will be subject to case-specific reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act, according to the PEIS.

The five-year leasing program was released last month and immediately drew criticism from industry groups and Republicans arguing that it imposed too many restrictions on exploration in the Arctic and reversed an earlier plan to allow leasing offshore Virginia. Environmentalists, meanwhile, said the plan was too risky in its promotion of drilling in the icy Arctic and high-risk ultra-deepwater drilling in the Gulf (E&ENews PM, June 28).