Now available online: proceedings from Florida Symposium on Offshore Energy

In response to the news this week that President Barack Obama would open parts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast to oil drilling, the Institute for Energy Systems, Economics and Sustainability (IESES) at The Florida State University has announced that the proceedings of the Florida Symposium on Offshore Energy it co-sponsored last fall and in February are available on the IESES Web site at www.ieses.fsu.edu/.

• Click on the symposium link in the center of the IESES home page to access the 471-page document. In it are the proceedings from Part 1: Oil and Gas (held Nov. 2, 2009), which investigated the challenges of technology and ecology, economics and policy; and Part II: Inshore Challenges of Offshore Energy Prospects (Feb. 1, 2010), which looked at special ecological, spatial and legal issues of energy development in the coastal zone of Florida with an emphasis on the Gulf of Mexico.

• To access the original webcasts of the events, click on the appropriate symposium links, located on the left-hand side of the IESES home page.

Florida State co-sponsored and hosted the Florida Symposium on Offshore Energy to advance a public dialogue on the many issues that must be addressed in any future offshore drilling proposal that the state of Florida considers. In addition to IESES, the symposium sponsors were the Florida State University Office of Research; the Environmental and Land Use Law Program at the College of Law; the departments of Oceanography, Economics and Biological Science; and the Tallahassee Democrat.

The Institute for Energy Systems, Economics and Sustainability is a public resource dedicated to addressing energy alternatives through academic research and analysis in engineering, science, infrastructure, governance and society. It brings together researchers with backgrounds in engineering, natural sciences, law, urban and regional planning, geography and economics. The institute is the state’s leading scholarship center looking at the informed governance, economics and decision making to support a sustainable-energy economy.