WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's administration on Tuesday announced a proposal to open up coastal waters from Virginia to Georgia for oil and gas drilling.
At the same time, the administration will ban drilling in Alaska in some parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
Opening the Eastern Seaboard to oil companies is a prize the industry has sought for decades. But environmental groups argue that the move would put the coasts of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia at risk for a disaster like the BP oil spill that struck the Gulf Coast in 2010.
"This is a balanced proposal that would make available nearly 80 percent of the undiscovered technically recoverable resources, while protecting areas that are simply too special to develop," the Interior secretary, Sally Jewell, said in a statement.
The proposal would open up 10 areas in the Gulf of Mexico, three in the Arctic Ocean, and one in the Atlantic Ocean, stretching from the coast of Virginia to Georgia.
The potential areas would require a 50-mile coastal buffer to minimize multiple-use conflicts, such as those from Department of Defense and NASA activities, renewable-energy activities, commercial and recreational fishing, critical habitat needs for wildlife and other environmental concerns.
The move to ban drilling in some Arctic waters is certain to enrage Alaskan lawmakers who are already angry about an administration plan, announced during the weekend, to provide tougher environmental protections in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a 19 million-acre sanctuary that is believed to contain large reserves of oil and gas.
"We continue to consider oil and gas exploration in the Arctic and propose for further consideration a new area in the Atlantic Ocean, and we are committed to gathering the necessary science and information to develop resources the right way and in the right places," Jewell said. "We look forward to continuing to hear from the public as we work to finalize the proposal."
The proposals are part of the Interior Department's latest five-year design, which lays out plans to sell federal leases for oil and gas development from 2017 to 2022.
The plan is subject to months of public hearings, and could be revised, but it does not require congressional approval.
It will not be the first time that the Obama administration has proposed offshore drilling in the Atlantic. In early 2010, before the BP oil spill began with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the administration proposed a five-year plan that would have allowed the federal government to sell drilling leases in the federal waters off Virginia. The administration abandoned that idea after the Gulf Coast spill.
Environmental groups said the prospect of Atlantic drilling is a risk that could lead to a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
"Opening Atlantic waters to offshore drilling would take us in exactly the wrong direction," said Bob Deans, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It would ignore the lessons of the disastrous BP blowout, the need to protect future generations from the dangers of climate change and the promise of a clean-energy future."
"The BP blowout oiled a thousand miles of coastline, about the distance from Savannah to Boston," Deans said. "Opening up part of the Atlantic to drilling could expose the entire Eastern Seaboard to the risks of a catastrophic blowout."
Oil companies have said they believe there is an energy bonanza beneath the Atlantic waters.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement estimates that there are 3.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil on the Atlantic's outer continental shelf and 31.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The estimates are based on two-dimensional seismic surveys that were done in the early 1980s, and energy industry experts say the true reserves may be far higher.
The industry also contends that it has learned lessons from the 2010 oil spill. Although no new laws governing offshore drilling safety have been passed since then, the big companies say the spill led to tighter industry standards that are designed to avoid such catastrophes.
BP already is facing a record $13.7 billion in potential fines under the Clean Water Act for its role in the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Despite the risks posed by offshore drilling, lawmakers in Virginia and other Southeastern states have pushed to open up their waters to oil companies, lured by the prospect of new revenue. Both of Virginia's Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, support drilling off their state's coast.
A Section on 01/28/2015