WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Tuesday lifted a moratorium it had imposed on deep-water offshore oil drilling in July during the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, saying that new rules should make drilling safe enough to resume.
While drilling isn’t expected to start again immediately, the timing of the announcement — six weeks ahead of schedule and three weeks before congressional and state elections — could give Democrats a boost at the polls. The moratorium has been blamed for thousands of lost jobs in an already damaged economy and posed a potential drag on some gulf-area Democrats’ election prospects.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announcing the move in a teleconference, said he expects criticism from both camps: industry interests that say the new standards are too onerous and drilling foes who say the moratorium is being lifted too soon.
To the latter group, Salazar said, “The truth is, there will always be risks associated with deep-water drilling. But we have now reached a point where we have significantly, in my view, reduced those risks.”
Even as the nation seeks more clean-energy alternatives, Salazar said, “we will still need oil and gas from the Gulf of Mexico to power our cars, our homes and our industry. But we can and we will make the drilling of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico safer than it ever has been.”
Some environmentalists quickly objected to lifting the moratorium.
Greenpeace USA executive director Phil Radford called the decision “pure politics of the most cynical kind.”
“It is all about the election season, not safety and environmental concerns,” Radford said. “The White House wants us to believe that they have solved all the dangers of offshore drilling and we can return to business as usual. It is a false promise, if not a big lie.”
Some oil-industry leaders were equally unhappy.
“The massive amounts of new, unworkable regulations and layers of burdensome red tape laid out by the Interior Department, which will add no environmental benefits, will make certain that a de facto moratorium on offshore energy development remains intact,” said Bruce Vincent, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the president of the Houston-based Swift Energy Co. He urged Congress and the White House to speed up the permitting process.
