Drilling off Florida is still on table, Interior Department official says

In a surprise statement undercutting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s announcement last week that he would exempt Florida from President Donald Trump’s offshore drilling plan, a senior Interior Department official said Friday that Florida’s coastal waters had not been excluded after all.

The Trump administration is moving to allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all U.S. coastal waters, lifting a ban on drilling imposed by President Barack Obama near the end of his term.

But after a meeting with Gov. Rick Scott of Florida on Jan. 9, Zinke had announced on Twitter that he was “removing Florida from consideration for any new oil and gas platforms.”

On Friday, the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Interior Department agency that manages offshore leasing, said Zinke’s Florida decision was not final.

“It is not a formal action, no,” Walter Cruickshank, the bureau’s acting director, told a subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources.

Instead, the bureau was pushing ahead with the required review of resources off the nation’s shores, including Florida’s, he said. A decision on whether to offer leases off Florida as part of the administration’s offshore program would come after that analysis.

Cruickshank said he was not aware of anyone at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management who had been consulted about Zinke’s Twitter message about Florida before it was posted.

Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior, said Cruickshank’s remarks did not necessarily contradict the secretary’s decision.