Who Prepared the Programmatic EIS

The OCS Alternative Energy Programmatic EIS was prepared by the Minerals Management Service with assistance from Argonne National Laboratory.

The OCS Alternative Energy Programmatic EIS was prepared by the Minerals Management Service, a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior with assistance from Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory.

About the Minerals Management Service (MMS)

The Minerals Management Service (MMS), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior, is the Federal agency that manages the nation's natural gas, oil and other mineral resources on the outer continental shelf (OCS). The agency also collects, accounts for and disburses more than $8 billion per year in revenues from Federal offshore mineral leases and from onshore mineral leases on Federal and Indian lands. The program is national in scope and headquartered in Washington, D.C. It includes two major programs, Offshore Minerals Management and Minerals Revenue Management. The Offshore program, which manages the mineral resources on the OCS, comprises three regions: Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific. The Minerals Revenue Management program is headquartered in Washington, D.C., but operationally based in Denver, Colorado.

About Argonne

Argonne National Laboratory is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers. It is also the nation's first national laboratory, chartered in 1946.

The Environmental Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory conducts applied research, assessment, and technology development in such areas as risk and waste management, natural resources, integrated assessments, restoration, pollution prevention, environmental policy analysis and planning, and environmental management.

The Programmatic EIS Team

The MMS used an interdisciplinary approach to develop the Programmatic EIS in order to consider the variety of resource issues and concerns identified. Specialists with expertise in the following disciplines were involved in the planning process: minerals and geology, wildlife and fisheries, air quality, visual resource analysis, outdoor recreation, archaeology, hydrology, sociology, and economics.