MOBILE, Alabama -- Federal officials chose to exclude the Deepwater Horizon spill from an economic analysis of the risks associated with oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a draft document made public Tuesday.

The draft Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was released for public comment by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Regulation and Enforcement.

The document weighs the environmental implications of continued drilling in federal waters between 2012 and 2017.

Federal officials did not respond to requests for comment made late Tuesday afternoon.

The economic analysis associated with the new impact statement projects the potential for future spills and the damage they might cause based on all "spills from 1964-2010 excluding the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon (DWH) event."

The agency excluded the largest spill in U.S. history in its calculations “as a rough balance between the remote chance of another (Deepwater Horizon) event and the otherwise much safer performance” in the 46 years prior to the BP spill.

The report suggests that the potential for an oil spill appears even smaller “if a more recent period is chosen (1990-2009)” for the risk analysis. For instance, using only the 19 years prior to the BP spill in the environmental analysis, the report concludes, would further “decrease the anticipated environmental costs” of continued drilling.

Critics said the new plan amounts to the government crossing its fingers and hoping nothing goes wrong.

“By omitting the nation’s largest environmental disaster from its calculation of the environmental costs of drilling, BOEMRE continues to bury its head in the sand and pretend that the Deepwater Horizon accident never happened,” Catherine Wannamaker, with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in an emailed statement.

Wannamaker said that even low-probability events such as the Deepwater Horizon blowout must be included when looking at the economic and environmental costs of offshore drilling.

“BOEMRE tries to move forward without truly accounting for these risks and costs,” Wannamaker said. “This is not a responsible course of action for a supposedly reformed agency.”