Leopards Coming to Eat Florida’s Face

I didn’t think the Leopards would eat MY face.

The Hill:

Florida Republicans are fuming as the Trump administration proposes to open up new drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico.

“The new maps released today by @SecretaryBurgum and @Interior outlining potential new offshore oil drilling sites in the Gulf of America are HIGHLY concerning—and we will be engaging directly with the department on this issue,” wrote Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) in a post on the social platform X.

“Preserving our state’s natural beauty is deeply important to the millions who call the Sunshine State home, our visitors, and those whose livelihoods depend on tourism,” Moody wrote.

The office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also criticized the plan, noting that in 2020, President Trump blocked drilling off the state’s coasts.

“Our Administration supports the 2020 Presidential Memorandum and urges the Department of Interior to reconsider and to conform to the 2020 Trump Administration policy,” Molly Best, a spokesperson for DeSantis, said in a statement to The Hill.

It’s a rare rift between the state’s Republicans and Trump, who made the state his primary residence in 2019. While his Mar-a-Lago resort is situated on the state’s east coast on the Atlantic Ocean, drilling in the eastern gulf would be more likely to impact the state’s west coast.

On Thursday, the Trump administration proposed a massive expansion of U.S. offshore drilling, which would include opening up new drilling in the eastern gulf, as well as in California.

California is reliably blue but has a few swing districts where the issue could be a big one. Florida, by contrast, has gone from a swing state to reliably red, so the drilling issue is a rare break for some of its members with the president. 

Financial Times (paywall):

Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, a gigantic steel structure about the size of a football field rises out of the blue, surrounded by ocean for 140 miles in every direction. The oil platform, bristling with cranes and wrapped in miles of pipes and cables, is part of a $5.7bn project called Anchor that is revolutionising how companies drill for the black stuff.

Anchor, which has been developed by US oil major Chevron and its partner TotalEnergies, uses equipment that can operate at ultra-high pressures, about a third higher than previously deployed by the industry, to access previously unobtainable resources.

The platform works in co-ordination with Deepwater Titan, a ship about the size of an aircraft carrier that drills wells to access reservoirs six miles below the water surface at 20,000 pounds of pressure per square inch (PSI), about twice the pressure that specialised structural concrete can withstand. 

“She is one of a kind,” says Jason Myers, Chevron’s drill site representative on Anchor, during a tour of the Deepwater Titan. “It’s going to open up a lot of prospects that . . . we have been unable to explore previously, before we had rigs of this capacity.”
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Investment fell to $18.6bn in the Gulf last year, down from $43.7bn in 2015, when adjusted for inflation, according to Rystad, a consultancy. The region now accounts for about 14 per cent of US oil production, compared to about a quarter in the early 2000s. But new technologies and a slower than expected transition away from fossil fuels are breathing new life into the US offshore industry, along with a dramatic loosening of regulation by the Trump administration.

The Gulf, 1.6mn square kilometres of water bordered by the US, Mexico and Cuba, is central to Donald Trump’s vision of unleashing US energy dominance. The president renamed the expanse of water “Gulf of America” within hours of taking office in January. He later overturned Biden-era restrictions on drilling and ordered a series of twice-yearly oil and gas lease sales until 2039. The first of these sales, named Big Beautiful Gulf One, is scheduled for December 10, covering 80mn acres.     

The revitalisation of the Gulf could be vital to maintain America’s position as the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, with onshore oil production forecast to fall in 2026 as producers of more costly shale cut investment in response to falling prices.