The expansion is likely to trigger huge political backlash, particularly on the West Coast and in Florida, where offshore drilling has generated sharp opposition from residents, environmental groups and businesses. | AP Photo Trump aims to open California, Florida, Atlantic waters for oil drilling The Interior Department's proposed plan would put up for auction the right to drill in areas that in some cases had been off limits for decades.

The Trump administration unveiled a plan Thursday to open vast new stretches of federal waters to oil and gas drilling, erasing the policies put in place by previous Democratic and Republican administrations and setting up a conflict with state governments fearful about the risk of spills.

The proposal drew immediate criticism from Florida officials, including Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a supporter of President Donald Trump who is expected to challenge Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson this year, as well as Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.


And Republican governors like New Jersey's Chris Christie and Maryland's Larry Hogan have in the past opposed opening the federal waters off their states. North Carolina’s Democratic governor weighed in Thursday, saying the move represented a “critical threat” to his state’s economy.

"I can sum it up in four words: not off our coast,” Gov. Roy Cooper said in a press release.

Even the U.S. military has also previously warned against allowing oil rigs near the Florida shore due to concerns they could interfere with F-35 fighter training maneuvers.

The Interior Department's newly proposed five-year outer continental shelf plan, designed to align with Trump’s call for increased domestic energy production, would put up for auction the right to drill in areas offshore that in some cases had been off limits for decades. It would allow Interior to offer for lease federal waters in the Arctic, as well as the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, even as the department proposes to loosen offshore drilling safety regulations put in place after the massive 2010 BP oil spill.

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“This is the start at looking at American energy dominance and looking at our offshore dominance," Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a conference call. "This is the beginning of an opening up. We will listen to all the communities of stakeholders. The states will have a voice.”

Thursday's move starts a process that will run for at least several months, since Interior is required to collect public comment on the plan. But the department has already taken some steps to open some formerly closed areas, proposing earlier Thursday to make available seismic survey data for the waters off Hawaii that would be useful for oil and gas companies looking to explore the area.

But it would put the administration — and oil and gas drillers — in direct opposition to state lawmakers who don’t want to see oil rigs dotting their coastline. Tourism in Gulf Coast states took years to recover from the 2010 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 people and spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the water, ultimately costing the oil company more than $40 billion in fines and clean-up.

“The question of to-drill-or-not-to-drill has already been asked and answered” by coastal states now included in Interior’s leasing map, said Diane Hoskins, campaign director at environmental group Oceana. “This plan proposes to open up places that have been closed to drilling for more than 30 years, and we expect those communities to make their voices heard.”

Industry groups applauded the move, saying the energy companies would benefit from increased access to federal lands.

"The plan announced today is a long term commitment to securing our energy future, and would help cement America’s role as an energy superpower, creating jobs and contributing to our economy," said Karen Harbert, chief executive officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Global Energy Institute.

In a Senate floor speech Wednesday, Nelson vowed to fight drilling in the state’s coastal waters, and threatened to seek to undo any Interior action by using the Congressional Review Act, a long-shot move since Republicans control both Congress and the White House.

Nelson called on Floridians to join him in fighting the move, invoking BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster and saying they should remember "what happened to us when the beaches of Pensacola Beach were blackened with tar and oil, and we lost a whole season of our guests, our tourists who come to this extraordinary state.”

Gov. Scott also joined in calling for Trump to reconsider, saying he has asked to meet with Zinke directly to urge him to remove Florida's coastal areas from the plan.

The White House downplayed Scott's criticism, and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “Just because we may differ on issues from time to time doesn’t mean that we can’t have an incredibly good and strong relationship."

The proposal calls for the first lease sales to take place in the waters off Alaska's northern coast before moving to the water off the lower 48 states.

"In 2019-2024, we will conduct 47 different lease sales, starting in Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Then we jump to lease sales in Pacific, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic planning areas," Kate MacGregor, deputy assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management, told the call.

President Barack Obama had considered opening portions off the Atlantic coast to oil and gas exploration until local pushback convinced his administration to reverse course. But the Trump administration may not place as much weight on local input, said Sierra Weaver, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“The governors of Virginia and North Carolina have specifically asked to exclude those states from a five-year leasing plan,” Weaver said. “You’re going to see a fight here, not only with locals but with state governments.”

Representatives for Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy, all of whom have opposed offshore drilling proposals in the past, declined to comment pending review of Interior’s proposed plan. Virginia Gov.-elect Ralph Northam also has previously voiced opposition to offshore drilling expansion near the state.

Prospects could be even dimmer for major new drilling in the Pacific. The waters off California haven’t been offered for drilling to companies in decades, and the region remains wary of new projects since the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara that was the worst in the country’s history until the Exxon Valdez spill two decades later.

California Gov. Jerry Brown pledged to fight the effort to restart drilling activity in the Pacific.

“This political decision to open the magnificent and beautiful Pacific Coast waters to oil and gas drilling flies in the face of decades of strong opposition on the part of Oregon, Washington and California — from Republicans and Democrats alike," he said in a statement. "For more than 30 years, our shared coastline has been protected from further federal drilling and we’ll do whatever it takes to stop this reckless, short-sighted action.”

Even if Interior’s plan becomes a reality, it’s not likely oil and gas companies would immediately ready their drill ships. Offshore drilling remains expensive and time consuming, a combination that may not make immediate sense in an era of cheap oil and ready-to-access onshore shale plays.

In August 2017, a lease sale for the areas of the Gulf of Mexico already open for drilling drew just $121 million for 508,096 acres, a far cry from the result in March 2013 before oil prices crashed when companies bid $1.2 billion for 1.7 million acres just in the central Gulf region.

Although oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to hit a record-high in 2018, companies are still wary of venturing into new areas, according to William Turner, analyst at Wood MacKenzie. Instead, they are more interested in expanding the footprint of their current offshore operations, a cheaper and more sure option that doesn’t require much new leasing.

Those companies may look at prospects further east, toward the coast of Florida, said Kevin Book, lead researcher at energy consultancy Clearview Energy Partners. But with even the state's GOP against drilling in the area, it may be more trouble than it’s worth.

“The eastern Gulf offers the best combination of prospectivity and proximity to existing infrastructure,” Book said. “But its greatest value may be politics, not petroleum — today’s inclusion of the Gulf of Mexico could pave the way to re-election for Florida Republicans who claim they stopped” drilling in the area.

Wood MacKenkzie's Turner said the waters off the Atlantic coast are more challenging to navigate than in the Gulf. Hurricanes pass through both regions, he said, but the swift water currents in the Atlantic can be too rapid to safely float drill rigs in the deepwater areas out of view of the shore.

“And the closer you get to shore the more people there will be who won’t like to see rigs on their horizon,” Turner said. “There's going to be pushback.”

Meanwhile, the Interior Department has drafted language to soften key parts to the offshore drilling safety rule put in place in the aftermath of the 2010 Gulf disaster, in some cases completely removing government oversight of drill rig security.

The draft rule proposal from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, seen by POLITICO, would roll back many parts of the Well Safety Rule that the Obama administration finalized in 2016.

Among the proposals is one that would remove BSEE from the process of inspecting and verifying parts of the blowout preventer, the device used to seal wells and the malfunction of which helped lead to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Instead, inspecting the blowout preventer will be left to “independent third parties.”

Oil and gas companies would also be off the hook for providing blowout prevention system test results to the agency in case BSEE personnel are not present at the site. BSEE, in its draft proposal, said the move would reduce its workload.

It would also remove the requirement that companies monitor their blowout control systems in real time, instead only mandating that companies possess the equipment necessary to do so. The draft rule says certain equipment need only be tested once during its lifespan instead of the current twice weekly.

Interior said that relaxing the rules would spur more oil and gas production, and save companies up to $946 million over a decade, BSEE estimates.

“By reducing the regulatory burden on industry, we are encouraging increased domestic oil and gas production while maintaining a high bar for safety and environmental sustainability," Director Scott Angelle said in a press release announcing the earlier rule change proposals.

But critics charge that overall changes, particularly to the Well Safety Rule, essentially put an agency created to enforce safety standards in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blast in the position of promoting oil and gas production over protecting rig workers.

“The rule was six years in the making, the result of multiple investigations of the Deepwater Horizon incident,” said Michael Bromwich, the former first director of BSEE and currently managing principal of The Bromwich Group. “It is odd, to say the least, that they are going to change a significant number of requirements in that well-considered regulation after only a year. It looks like a feeding frenzy — the door is open, tell us what changes you want, and we’ll provide those to you.”

Alex Guillén contributed to this report.

