With the federal Bureau of Ocean Management (BOEM) working on its next five-year offshore plan, a member of Congress said on May 4 that its meager offering of leases has become a bureaucratic nightmare.

Representative Rob Bishop, chairman of the U.S. House Resources Committee, said private industry has made strides with onshore technology, but largely that’s been through the exploitation of private and state lands. Bishop joined panelists at the OTC panel “Offshore Energy Development: Improving Federal and State Cooperation.”

Nowadays, the federal government owns one-third of the country and has severely limited exploration on its lands, Bishop said. The same is true in the water.

“The federal government has to do more in offering leasing opportunities,” Bishop said. “One lease in the Atlantic and three in the Arctic is extremely underwhelming.”

The BOEM is in the process of developing its 2017 to 2022 five-year leasing plan for the exploration of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

The plan is a critical part of America’s energy policy. BOEM estimates the U.S. OCS holds technically recoverable resources of about 90 Bbbl of oil and more than 11.3 Tcm (400 Tcf) of natural gas.

Abbey Hopper, BOEM director, said her agency is listening to all players.

Hopper announced at the panel that BOEM has instituted a specific state outreach program in which the agency will write to each of the governors and invite them to have a conversation with the bureau. “We have just concluded 23 scoping sessions throughout the United States, many in the mid- and south-Atlantic,” she said.

Hopper said communication is key. BOEM received more than 28,000 comments in support of offshore energy exploration, according to the Consumer Energy Alliance. Hopper said BOEM is a regulatory agency.

“We are bound by statutory authority,” she said. “We balance environment and economic development. We don’t think you have to choose one or the other—it’s how we account for both.”

Communication still needs to happen.

Bishop said BOEM’s five-year plans need to be looked at more closely and with new seismic information that isn’t decades old. “States need to be allowed to do more than comment on what government deigns them to do,” Bishop said.

The government must do more in offering offshore leasing opportunities if it wants to move away from being “bullied by OPEC” and toward being “an ally to our friends,” Bishop said.

Despite the muted oil commodity market and record supplies at Cushing, Okla., the U.S. still imports about 7.3 MMbbl/d of crude oil to meet demand, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency estimated in its 2014 Annual Energy Outlook that U.S. crude oil production might meet 50% of demand in 2030 and 45% of demand in 2040.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, a panelist and chairman of the Outer Continental Governors Coalition, said the waters off his state have not been seismically surveyed in 25 years. He wants to conduct seismic tests by the fall but noted that the testing isn’t just for use for oil and gas explorers but for wind and solar power generation.

But his state’s relationship with the federal government is muddied by finances.

“If we get into the energy business in federal waters, we want to have some revenue-sharing policy very similar to what the Gulf states have,” he said. “Currently, the federal government is not considering at the executive level revenue sharing, which would make it very difficult to sell to the general public of North Carolina citizens.”

McCrory’s dilemma was in telling North Carolinians the state is in the offshore business but doesn’t get to share in that revenue. “Without that, you’re not going to have any governor support for offshore exploration,” he said.

Offshore