Trump to lift Obama’s bans on offshore drilling – Washington Examiner

President Trump is preparing to issue an executive order aimed at reversing former President Barack Obama's ban on offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Arctic coasts while directing the Interior Department to redo its five-year energy leasing plan.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reportedly discussed the new executive order during remarks to the industry on Thursday, according to a report citing sources in attendance. The order would reopen the Obama-era 2017 to 2022 five-year offshore drilling plan to include federal lease sales in the Atlantic Ocean and Arctic seas in Alaska.

The Obama administration had teased the idea of including first-time sales off the Atlantic coast in a draft plan in 2015, which it later reneged on with little justification.

It also pulled back on Arctic lease sales in the final lease plan, saying low oil prices made it economically unfeasible for the industry to deploy the resources necessary to drill in the Arctic. The oil and gas industry opposed the final decision on the 2017 to 2022 plan.

Later, Obama took separate actions to ban offshore drilling in both Alaska and the Atlantic, using a 1953 law that governs offshore leases. There is no provision in the law that allows the next president to repeal the decision. But Trump's executive order apparently will direct the Interior Department to find a way.

Bloomberg News, which first reported the executive order on Thursday, said the order would reverse the ban. The report did not say whether other offshore drilling rules would be rolled back in addition to the ban reversals and the five-year plan revamp.

Zinke said the order would come soon, potentially coinciding with the seven-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20. The 2010 disaster resulted in the deaths of nearly a dozen oil rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the largest oil spill in the industry's history.

The spill caused the Obama administration to restructure the Department of Interior's offshore regulators to improve federal oversight of the industry. The disaster also spawned a number new regulations from the Interior Department that the oil industry called duplicative and costly. The industry said it had developed its own industry rules that addressed the increased need for safety that make the federal rules moot.

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Trump to lift Obama's bans on offshore drilling - Washington Examiner