White House removes Atlantic from oil lease consideration after political backlash

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The Interior Department has removed the federal waters off the Atlantic coast from President Donald Trump’s upcoming offshore drilling plan after Republicans in the region pressed to keep oil and natural gas rigs away from their shores, three people familiar with the latest moves told POLITICO.

The five-year leasing plan, aimed at reopening areas long closed to drilling, will still seek to allow rigs off the California coast, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations. That could create a conflict with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is trying to raise his national political profile in a state that opposes offshore drilling but also has some of the highest gasoline prices in the country.

The plan’s latest iteration will also include a portion of the eastern Gulf of Mexico but provide a buffer around Florida, a Republican stronghold where politicians from both parties have long opposed drilling, these people said. It’s unclear whether the buffer would be large enough to avoid fierce objections from Floridians, who have battled against similar proposals in past decades because of fears that an oil spill would devastate their tourism economy.

Interior is expected to propose the new plan any day now, these people said. The proposal could still change before made public and then will have to undergo a review process before becoming final.

“Trump flatly denied the Atlantic” area’s inclusion in the plan after hearing from Republican lawmakers who were “firmly opposed” to the idea, said one person familiar with the process.

The administration had no immediate response to the newest reporting.

“We do not discuss ongoing policy deliberations that may or may not be happening,” a White House spokesperson said. An Interior spokesperson did not respond to questions.

The initial plan reported by POLITICO earlier this month had called for including the Atlantic and eastern Gulf, but became a “political hot potato, [with] Congressional Republicans getting nervous,” said a second person familiar with the planning.

This person and the others said the latest version of the map is also expected to include a zone of at least 100 nautical miles around Florida where Interior would not offer lease sales. Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, the state’s former governor, has also opposed drilling off the state’s coast.

The oil industry is mainly interested in opening up a small stretch of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico that starts just south of Alabama’s border with Florida, market and industry sources have said. Few, if any, companies have expressed interest in drilling in the Atlantic or even the Pacific.

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Newsom’s office in June sent a letter to Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management affirming “California’s continued opposition to additional offshore oil and gas development.”

“The Trump administration has yet to formally share with us their plan, but expensive and riskier offshore drilling would put our communities at risk and undermine the economic stability of our coastal economies,” Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said in a statement on Wednesday.

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