The Obama administration has put forward a plan to allow oil and natural gas drilling off the Atlantic Coast for the first time.

The administration's proposal, released by the Interior Department Tuesday morning, would make a drilling lease available for federally-owned waters off the coasts of Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell told reporters that the lease may not ultimately include all of these states -- once more interest is gauged and data is gathered, the area will be narrowed.

Jewell added that support from state governments "weighed heavily" on the department's decision to open up the area to drilling. The earliest a lease could be granted in the Atlantic would be around 2021, she said.

The Atlantic seaboard is one of eight planning areas where the Interior Department has proposed 14 potential lease sales.

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Every five years, the government outlines what federal lands it will lease out. In 2010, in the wake of the BP oil spill, the administration halted plans to open up the Atlantic seaboard for drilling. Later that year, the administration reaffirmed its decision to keep the area protected.

Additional areas in the draft proposal include sales in parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the coast of Alaska. At the same time, President Obama has designated portions of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas as off limits from consideration.

"This is a balanced proposal that would make available nearly 80 percent of the undiscovered technically recoverable resources, while protecting areas that are simply too special to develop," Jewell said.

The decision got a mixed reception from environmentalists and their supporters. They welcomed the additional protection for Alaska but questioned the wisdom of opening the Atlantic to offshore drilling.

"I am absolutely opposed to offshore drilling and always will be," Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland said in a statement.

"While I am pleased that Maryland was not included in the Department of Interior's plan, I am concerned that our neighboring states were.," she said. "As we saw after the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, when oil starts to leak it knows no boundaries. Offshore drilling can devastate the environment, harming our unique and fragile coastline and wreaking havoc on the coastal communities whose economies rely heavily on tourism."

The oil and gas industry and its supporters also came away disappointed.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska suggested Obama was trying to to "shut down oil and gas production in Alaska's federal areas" while the American Petroleum Institute (API) contends that the administration was closing areas to drilling that will cost "840,000 new American jobs, 3.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, and more than $200 billion in government revenue."

"Keeping our role as the world leader in energy will require a commitment from the president to opening new areas to offshore oil and natural gas development," API Director of Upstream and Industry Operations Erik Milito said. "At this early stage, it would be premature and irresponsible to leave out of the draft program any area that holds the potential for significant discoveries of oil and natural gas."