“This strikes me as a shift back to the track that the administration was on prior to last year’s oil spill,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environment fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It seems the lesson that the administration took is that offshore drilling needs to be regulated better and done better, not that it shouldn’t be done at all.”

The plan is almost certain to face legal challenges.

“No drill bits are going to hit the Arctic seafloor until at least one and probably several courts have reviewed this plan,” said Brendan Cummings, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is already suing to stop drilling in the Chukchi Sea west of Alaska. “From the perspective of ocean drilling and climate, it’s hard to see a difference between this administration and the last one.”

Shell still needs to win approval of its drilling plan for the Chukchi Sea, which is west of the Beaufort Sea and more remote.

The company has proposed drilling four wells at a depth of approximately 160 feet of water about 20 miles from shore in the Beaufort Sea. The BP well that exploded in the gulf in April 2010 was at a depth of more than 5,000 feet and 40 miles from the Louisiana coast. The accident killed 11 workers and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Energy experts and industry executives said the move on Thursday reflected a partial warming of relations between the oil industry and Obama administration since the BP disaster.

“I don’t know if I would call them friends yet, but I look at this as a step in the right direction,” said Craig T. Castille, operations manager for deepwater projects at Stone Energy, who added that the permit process in the Gulf of Mexico remained slower than the industry would like.

Shell has spent years trying to convince federal regulators and several courts that it can drill safely in the Arctic, and every year one hurdle or another has stood in its way.