Trump Administration Opens 90 Percent Of America's Coastal Waters To Oil Drilling, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Atlantic And Pacific Oceans Were Not Yet Available For Lease

WASHINGTON. The Department of the Interior announced Thursday a draft proposal to open more than 90 percent of America's outer continental shelf to oil and gas leasing, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that vast stretches of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans had been sitting off the coast generating no lease revenue whatsoever.

The Draft Proposed Program for 2019 through 2024 would make available some 47 potential lease sales in waters that had been protected from drilling for decades, a scope the Interior Department described as the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas access in the nation's history. Officials characterized the prior arrangement, under which the oceans had remained oceans, as a missed opportunity.

"For too long, enormous quantities of perfectly good federal water have been allowed to simply remain water," said one source within the administration, who explained that the proposal would correct a decades-old imbalance in which the seafloor was visible to energy companies without being technically obtainable by them. "Every coastline is a coastline that could be doing more."

Five days later, the administration announced that Florida would be removed from the leasing plan, citing the state's reliance on tourism and what officials called its unique coastline, following a brief meeting between the Interior Secretary and Gov. Rick Scott at a Tallahassee airport. The exemption applied to the only coastal state containing a residence of the President, who has spent numerous weekends at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, several hundred feet from the newly drilling-free Atlantic.

Governors of other coastal states, Republican and Democratic alike, requested identical exemptions for their own beaches, tourism economies, and oceans, and were informed that Florida's situation was distinct. The administration did not specify the distinction. Affected officials noted that residents of New Jersey, California, and South Carolina also looked at the ocean from time to time and would, on balance, prefer it without rigs.

At press time, the administration had clarified that the proposal remained only a draft, and that the public would be given ample opportunity to comment on which of its own shorelines it least wanted to watch from a beach chair.