Oil Drilling | featured news

President Barack Obama will not be allowing new drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico for at least seven years, according to a senior administration official.

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.

Energy companies in the Gulf of Mexico will have to permanently plug nearly 3,500 nonproducing wells and dismantle about 650 unused platforms, the Obama administration says.

BP Plc's ruptured Gulf of Mexico well that caused the biggest U.S. offshore oil spill ever could be killed for good within four days, the U.S. official overseeing the spill response said on Wednesday.

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.

BP is set to begin drilling off Libya amid safety concerns over the Gulf of Mexico spill and accusations over the Lockerbie bomber.

BP said today its attempt to place a new cap on its ruptured undersea well was proceeding as planned. But while robots replace the old cap, crude is flowing freely.

A co-chairman of the commission that will study the oil spill said it would probably not lift the moratorium on deepwater drilling until next year.

Government scientists say as many as 40,000 barrels of oil per day have been gushing into the gulf. BP has said the blown-out well will not be plugged before August.

Government scientists said Thursday that as many as 40,000 barrels of oil have been flowing daily from the blown-out BP well, doubling earlier estimates and greatly expanding the scope of what is already the largest spill in U.S.

The effort to place a massive containment dome over a gushing underwater wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico was dealt a setback when a large volume of hydrates -- icelike crystals that form when gas combines with water -- accumulated inside the vessel, a BP official said Saturday.