Update, 7/27: Congress members defend sanctuary boundary

ALPENA, MI -- A 3,850 square-mile expansion of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron could be rolled back under President Donald Trump's order to reconsider protections for offshore waters that could be opened to oil and gas drilling.

The 30-day public comment window began June 26 on the Department of Commerce review of 11 national marine sanctuaries and monuments following Trump's April 28 executive order, called "Implementing an America-First Offshore Energy Strategy."

The order targets any marine sanctuaries or monument established or expanded since April 2007 and halted the government from naming any more. It includes designations made under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

The order aims to expand offshore drilling, but questions remain about how that might pertain to the Great Lakes, which have been off-limits to oil & gas drilling since 2005. Michigan banned drilling in its Great Lakes waters in 2002.

(Comment on the review here).

The Thunder Bay sanctuary and preserve in Lake Huron was designated in 2000 and expanded from 448 square miles to 4,300 square miles in 2014. The sanctuary is a destination which draws shipwreck divers and tourists to Alpena. It's the only National Marine Sanctuary in the Great Lakes or fresh water.

The boundary, which extends from Cheboygan to Alcona counties and east to the mid-lake border, protects from disturbance several hundred known and suspected shipwrecks in Lake Huron. The Alpena headquarters features a shipwreck museum and provides a staging area for scientists and researchers studying ecology, natural resources and maritime archaeology.

Thunder Bay researchers are busy this summer conducting an extensive review of the expanded area for undiscovered shipwrecks.

Environmental groups called the federal review a continuation of Trump's "war on the Great Lakes."

Trump's White House has taken several actions seen as hostile to the ecology and economy of Great Lakes states, most notably eliminating the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative cleanup program in the administration's 2018 budget proposal and blocking the release of a plan to stop Asian carp in the Illinois Waterway.

"The Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron had broad Michigan public stakeholder and bipartisan support when it was expanded in 2014," said Howard Learner, director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago. "Scaling back the Thunder Bay Sanctuary is misguided and counterproductive."

Inquiries with Thunder Bay officials were referred to public affairs staff at the Department of Commerce, which did not return messages.

Trump's order has also thrown into confusion efforts to develop a sanctuary around a 1,260-square mile area of shipwrecks on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. The designation was in the public comment phase before the final proposal draft.

Before Trump was inaugurated, the Wisconsin-Lake Michigan Sanctuary was one of five such projects under various stages of development around the Great Lakes, including two in Lake Superior, two in Lake Erie and one in Lake Ontario.

A proposed Maryland sanctuary along a 52-square-mile stretch of the tidal Potomac River had also reached the public review phase.

According to NOAA personnel not authorized to publicly comment about the review, neither Thunder Bay nor Wisconsin-Lake Michigan officials have received any specific guidance yet about how to proceed during the review period.

According to the Federal Register notice, marine reviewers must analyze the acreage and overhead costs of managing each sanctuary on the list, the adequacy of tribal consultations beforehand and any "opportunity costs associated with potential energy and mineral exploration and production from the Outer Continental Shelf, in addition to any impacts on production in the adjacent region."

In several cases (though not with Thunder Bay), the marine sanctuary review overlaps with another Trump-ordered review of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act since 1996. The Department of Interior is conducting that process.

The oil and gas industry praised Trump's order in April, hailing its potential to create jobs and expand access to offshore deposits, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico.

A temporary ban on Great Lakes oil drilling passed Congress in 2001 and was signed by President Bush, who made the ban permanent in 2005. The bipartisan move was opposed by then-Gov. John Engler and the Republican-controlled Michigan legislature. Prior to 2002, there had been 13 directional wells angled to reach beneath Michigan's Great Lakes bottomland permitted since 1979.

In 2005, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated there is 312 million barrels of untapped oil, 5.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 122 million barrels of natural gas liquids under the Great Lakes. Michigan waters account for most of those totals; 90 percent of the oil, 41 percent of natural gas and 68 percent of natural gas liquids.

Lake Huron covers the most undiscovered oil and natural gas liquid, according to the USGS report, which did not assess Minnesota or Lake Superior. An estimated 141 million barrels of oil are untapped under the lake, about 45 percent of the Great Lakes total.

Across the border, Canada does not allow offshore oil drilling in the Great Lakes, but it does permit directional oil drilling under the lakebed from onshore, as well as offshore gas drilling. The Canadian production takes places in the central-eastern part of Lake Erie.

Erin McDonough, president of the Michigan Oil and Gas Association, did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the Thunder Bay review.

Under the review, sanctuaries that could be reduced in size:

- Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary in California, which was expanded to 9,600 acres in May 2007.

- Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary in California, which was expanded to 484,480 acres in March 2015.

- Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary in California, which was expanded to nearly 1.3 million acres in March 2015.

- Marianas Trench Marine National Monument in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which was designated in January 2009 at 60 million acres.

- Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in California, which was expanded to 496,000 acres in November 2008.

- National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa, which was expanded to nearly 8.7 million acres in July 2012.

- Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean was designated in Sept. 2016 at 3.1 million acres.

- Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument which was designated in 2009 and expanded to 55.6 million acres in Sept. 2014.

- Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii, which was expanded to 283 million acres in August 2016.

- Rose Atoll Marine National Monument in American Samoa, which was designated in January 2009 at 8.6 million acres.

- Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Michigan, which was expanded to more than 2.4 million acres in September 2014.