Oil Drilling Moratorium | featured news

Months after the nation’s worst oil disaster, the Obama administration will lift its moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the White House announced Tuesday morning.

A six-month ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would directly put more than 9,000 people out of work and indirectly affect another 14,000 jobs, according to a memo from the nation's top drilling regulator.

The Texas attorney general sued the Obama administration on Wednesday over its new deepwater offshore drilling moratorium, claiming that it is unjustified and that federal officials did not contact the state before issuing the ban.

Washington was preparing a revised offshore oil drilling moratorium and cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico returned to normal on Friday after hurricane Alex passed through the region without doing major damage.

A federal judge denied a request by the U.S. government to delay an order that allows deepwater drilling to resume.

The Obama administration scrambled on Tuesday to resurrect a ban on deepwater oil drilling after a U.S. judge declared that its six-month moratorium was too broad and arbitrary, despite the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

President Barack Obama will announce on Thursday that a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling will continue for six months while a commission studies the reasons for the Gulf of Mexico spill, a White House aide said.