Task Force to Give Bush Options on Offshore Oil : Environment: Sources say the blue-ribbon panel has reached no consensus for a policy on drilling off the California coast.

A federal task force will give President Bush a series of options today for oil exploration off the coast of Northern and Southern California, but Administration sources said the alternatives would not include a permanent drilling ban.

The task force headed by Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. conducted its final meeting Tuesday to consider last-minute editing changes in its report and planned to present the lengthy document to the President today without ceremony.

Although a White House spokesman said that no timetable had been set for the President to act on the report, there was speculation that Bush would announce his decision in his State of the Union message at the end of the month.

Bush put the Ronald Reagan Administration’s plans for aggressive development of two offshore oil and gas deposits off California and one off Florida on hold last February, and ordered the blue-ribbon review of economic and environmental implications of drilling.

“The task force looked at environmental, technical and scientific factors,” said Interior Department spokesman Steven Goldstein. “The options it is presenting to the President are broad-based and provide him the greatest latitude in making his decision.”

Only one final copy of the report was made and there was no indication that the White House intended to make it public. The report, said Goldstein, was written as a “deliberative” document and such documents ordinarily are not released.

Sources said that the task force, which included representatives of the Energy Department, Commerce Department, White House Office of Management and Budget, and Environmental Protection Agency, decided to give Bush options rather than specific recommendations after it became clear that there was no consensus on a single course.

The California tracts included in the review are known as Lease Sale 91, located off the coast of Northern California, and Lease Sale 95, located off the southern coast.

Sources familiar with the task force’s deliberations said that Bush would be presented with three options for each of the three areas, ranging from proceeding with one lease sale within a year to delaying development for a decade.

The decision to present a range of options rather than specific recommendations was encouraged by the White House, the sources said, to give the President maximum latitude in establishing Administration policy.

Such a strategy offers Bush, who has characterized himself as an “environmental President,” the opportunity to take full credit for a decision to restrain development, if he decides to take an environmentally popular course.

“It puts it back on Bush’s desk, which is actually where we want it,” said Robert Hattoy, regional representative of the Southern California Sierra Club. “We want to see whether the Bush campaign rhetoric, which said no oil drilling, holds up to reality. We expected nothing from this task force, and we got it in abundance.”

Since the panel began its work, Congress, incensed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, imposed additional restrictions on oil development within the Outer Continental Shelf--an area that begins about three miles from the shoreline.

Sources acknowledged that panel members discussed the political impact of offshore drilling policy early in their deliberations but ultimately opted to eliminate political considerations from their report.

Although the President suspended activity on Lease Sales 95 and 91 while the task force studied the matter, Congress broadened the ban to include Lease Sale 119 off California’s central coast and barred pre-lease activity until five months after completion of the report.

Just two months ago, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences told the federal task force that the Interior Department does not have sufficient information on the environmental and economic impact of drilling to allow development to proceed.

The National Academy of Sciences report, mandated by the task force, said that further research should be conducted in all three of the lease areas before moving into development.

In the Southern California lease area, the science panel reported, data on ocean currents were inadequate and unreliable, suggesting that there would be little preparation for dealing with a spill in the area.

The panel was disappointed by the conclusions contained in the National Academy of Sciences report, but sources said that reservations raised by the science panel provided a useful framework for the options finally chosen.

“In the end, the NAS report was less limiting than people originally thought it would be,” one Administration official said.

About the same time the task force received the report from the science panel, there were strong hints from Lujan that the recommendations or options put before the President would be far less restrictive than environmentalists had wanted.

“We must reverse the growing trend toward summarily dismissing the possibility of leasing in areas which offer great potential for supplying our whole nation with energy resources,” Lujan told an oil industry dinner in Texas in November.

“If we can’t talk about future drilling off the coasts of California and Florida,” he said, “where can we? Georges Bank? Coastal North Carolina? Off Washington and Oregon? Alaska? And if these locations are off limits, then what makes offshore drilling acceptable anywhere else?”