Interior Prepping To Push Offshore Drilling All Around Florida - But Only After November Elections
The Trump administration is preparing to open the door to oil and gas drilling off Florida’s coast — but will wait until after the November election to avoid blowback in a swing state whose waters both parties have long considered sacrosanct, according to four people familiar with the plan. Drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico would fulfill a long-sought goal of energy companies, giving them access to potentially billions of barrels of oil that have been off-limits since the federal government withdrew leases it had sold in 1985. But even the possibility of drilling is a politically explosive topic for Floridians, who worry that oil spills would devastate their tourism-based economy in a reprise of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
President Donald Trump, who has set “energy dominance” as a key national goal, has eased regulations on offshore drilling put in place by the Obama administration. Interior has spent years working on a proposed drilling plan that would expand oil companies‘ access to waters around the country's coastline, including a draft plan issued in 2018 by the Trump administration that considered opening the federal waters off both of Florida's coasts.
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“Whatever is decided is expected to come out within two to three weeks of the election,” said one person who has had recent discussions with Interior officials about the issue and who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. The eastern Gulf is the “golden trophy” for the industry because it could be producing oil within 10 years using existing infrastructure from the Gulf’s western portion, the person said.
A second person who recently spoke to Interior officials said they had predicted that the plan would probably come out after the Nov. 3 election but before Trump’s current term ends in January. The timing was driven partly by the sensitive politics in Florida, but also because Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was conducting reviews to ensure it was legally defensible, the person said. Two people who work in the energy industry said they had heard a similar timeline from agency officials several months ago for releasing the plan, which has been under development since the early days of the Trump administration. “It’s a given that new acreage will become available when the politics of reelection are behind [Trump],” said one person in the industry, who described the eastern Gulf of Mexico as “the prize acreage.”
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/10/interior-drilling-florida-waters-november-election-310595
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