Barack Obama reverses on offshore drilling

The White House’s uneasy on again, off again relationship with offshore oil drilling is off again.

Wednesday, the Interior Department said it would not propose oil exploration off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines or the eastern Gulf of Mexico for at least seven years.

At the time, Obama said the administration would take exploratory steps towards opening up the eastern Gulf and the Atlantic Coast to drilling. That announcement was generally seen as a potential landmark series of steps towards allowing drilling in uncharted waters.

Less than a month later, the April 20 blowout of BP’s Macondo well led to the unprecedented Gulf of Mexico oil spill that spewed an estimated 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. Since then, the administration has tried to put a temporary deepwater drilling ban in place and come under fire for simultaneously hampering economic development and not doing enough to protect the environment.

“The changes that we are making today really are based on the lessons that we have been learning” since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig, Salazar said.

Interior’s 2012-2017 offshore drilling lease strategy will proceed “safely and responsibly” with offshore drilling “in the right ways and the right places,” he added.

The March announcement was not a guarantee that the administration was going to propose allowing oil and gas drilling in the eastern Gulf and off the Atlantic Coast. For one, Congress would have to act on allowing that drilling.

Congress in 2006 – as part of a deal with Florida lawmakers – put the far eastern Gulf of Mexico near the Sunshine State’s borders off-limits until 2022 as part of a package that made available 8.3 million acres to oil and gas development in the more east-central part of the gulf. The administration thought of opening up more of those waters before the BP spill.

Salazar also announced Wednesday that the next lease sales in the western and central Gulf of Mexico – where drilling is currently allowed under law – will occur in late 2011 and 2012 after the department finishes its environmental review. He also emphasized that only an estimated one third of leases available to drilling companies in the gulf are currently being used by those companies.

In the Arctic, Salazar said Interior will “proceed with upmost caution,” leaving open the question of whether it will green light plans by Shell to drill in shallow waters off the coast of Alaska.

Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby is in D.C. and will meet with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement Director Michael Bromwich Thursday to talk about the company’s delayed drilling projects in the Beaufort Sea. That drilling operation is at most 200 feet deep, as opposed to the 5,000-foot Macondo well that ruptured and sparked the unprecedented Gulf spill this summer.

“We’re trying to clarify timing right now,” Slaiby told POLITICO Wednesday. He is also meeting with the state’s three-member congressional delegation as well.

It is the last set of meetings in Washington before Shell has to decide whether to pursue any drilling activities off Alaska next year and company officials are trying to get certainty one way or another this month.