Senate leaders announced a bipartisan deal Wednesday to open much of the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration, while providing significant protections for Florida's west coast over the next two decades. The compromise would create a 125-mile no-drilling zone off the Florida Panhandle, while the waters off Tampa Bay would be off-limits to drilling for 234 miles. The protections would last through 2022. Energy companies, meanwhile, would gain access to reserves of oil and natural gas in waters that are now off-limits, and states that allow offshore drilling would earn a larger share of royalties that companies pay for federal drilling rights.Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., helped broker the deal and said he supports it, though passage by the full Congress is not assured. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., joined the news conference where the deal was announced but stopped short of endorsing it. "The devil is in the details, and both Sen. Martinez and I want to see it in writing," Nelson said. "If it is as described to me, it is very promising."
The new deal shows that although political pressure to drill off the nation's coasts is rising with energy prices, the Senate is not ready to adopt the sweeping measure the U.S. House passed last month, which called for opening to drilling all U.S. waters past 50 miles, unless states opted to restrict it up to 100 miles.