Faced with intense opposition from environmentalists, the director of the US Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management defended the administration’s conditional approval of Shell’s plans to drill in the Arctic this summer, a decision she indicated was based on both federal statute and, partly, national security. “There are certain regulatory requirements and [Shell] had met all of those requirements,” BOEM Director Abigail Ross Hopper said in an interview with Platts on Wednesday. “We don’t have the ability to push things back, we can either approve or deny or approve with conditions. [Shell] met all the regulatory requirements … there’s not a basis upon which to reject it.” The majority of environmental groups are pushing for an effective ban on US Arctic drilling, a path some felt President Barack Obama may have been moving toward when in late January he designated 9.8 million acres in the Beaufort and Chukchi […]