The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Friday lifting the nation's 40-year-old ban on oil exports.

The vote was 261-159.

"This is a bipartisan bill," Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the original sponsor of the bill, said before the vote. "We have a large number of Democrats ... and large number of Republicans" supporting the bill. "It helps every sector of the economy."

Repealing the ban has become a major priority for the GOP as a job creator in the oil and gas sector being pummeled by low oil prices. Critics of the bill fear removal of the ban would drive up energy prices and harm the economy.

Dueling reports from federal number-crunching offices in recent months fueled the division over lifting the ban. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress' nonpartisan research arm, issued a study showing that repealing the ban would raise the cost of oil by $2.50 at the well.

However, it also said that repealing it would boost Treasury revenue from federal oil and gas leases.

That report came after a study by the Energy Information Administration earlier this summer said the price of gasoline would drop as a result of repealing the ban.

The bill would repeal the 40-year-old restrictions on oil exports that were put into place in 1975 following the Arab oil embargo. Proponents of the bill call the policy "archaic."

A number of groups representing oil and gas producers, unsurprisingly, were pleased with the vote.

"The bipartisan result of today's vote to remove the outdated U.S. crude oil export ban demonstrates that policymakers from across the ideological spectrum agree that removing barriers to U.S competitiveness and trade is good policy," said George Baker, the head of Producers for American Crude Oil Exports. The group represents a segment of the largest independent oil and gas producers using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract oil and natural gas from shale formations. Fracking has turned the U.S. into the world's top producer of oil and natural gas. Baker said the vote is a positive sign that momentum is growing to repeal the ban, as the bill makes its way to the Senate.

Critics of the bill say the producers are fooling themselves. "Big oil is all hat and no cattle when it comes to their claims of momentum in the face of these facts," said Karl Frisch, executive director of the group Allied Progress that is focused on holding special interest groups accountable.

"Today's vote was nothing more than another piece of meaningless political theater by a dysfunctional House of Representatives that routinely passes legislation with no hope of success," Frisch said. "Even oil market analysts, oil company executives, and journalists who cover the oil industry say that legislation to lift the ban is almost certain to fail this Congress" when it hits the Senate.

Many believe the legislation faces high hurdles in the Senate. President Obama has said he will veto the bill, saying Congress should focus on clean energy instead.

Margo Thorning, senior vice president and chief economist for the American Council for Capital Formation, told the Washington Examiner that the president's position on lifting the ban may change once negotiations on a climate change deal have concluded later this year in Paris.

Thorning said lifting the ban is the right thing to do to support free markets. But Obama is trying to build his case before the United Nations to secure a global deal on reducing emissions from fossil fuels, and Senate Democrats are supporting him on that, she says. If the bill reaches the Senate before the climate change talks conclude in December, it is "probably not" going to move, but "at a later time it might pass," she said.

Nevertheless, the House vote is important for lifting the ban eventually.