Early one morning in March 2010, Captain Gary Jarvis cast a heavyweight line into the Gulf of Mexico from the deck of his 57 foot charter boat, Backdown 2. The sun hadn’t yet risen. But bright white spotlights from the 25-story oil rig nearby illuminated the dark waves and attracted the fisherman’s prize — yellowfin tuna. Jarvis and his two deckhands spent hours reeling in the high-dollar sportfish before turning the boat home toward Destin, Florida. It had been a good fishing day at the rig, and Jarvis assumed there would be many more.
That oil rig was BP’s Deepwater Horizon. Less than a month later, the rig exploded and sank in the oil spill that would become known by the same name. The disaster killed 11 people and injured 17. Over 200 million gallons of Louisiana crude oil flowed uncontrolled into the Gulf for 87 days before the well was plugged. Oil slicks spread thousands of miles, fouling beaches in all five Gulf states in what remains the largest marine oil spill in American history.
Fifteen years later, Gulf communities have largely moved on. After a multi-billion dollar settlement from BP and regulatory reform, the nationwide outcry over industry recklessness quieted to a murmur. The white-sand beaches, now cleaned up, draw millions of tourists once again.
But oil companies keep drilling — deeper than ever before—and they are also looking east. President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” philosophy now has some of the industry’s biggest players ready to bid on leases closer to Florida’s coast. The administration announced on Thursday it plans to open part of the Eastern Gulf, off limits for decades, to oil and gas exploration.
As wells in the shallower parts of the Gulf run dry, oil companies have shifted to a new trend: “20K technology,” which involves drilling at higher pressures in water miles deep. While the industry has been drilling in ultra-deepwater for years, 20K allows access to wells previously deemed too risky. Industry executives say the new technology is safe, cutting edge and secures America’s future as a global energy giant.
But some experts say the risks of ultra-deepwater drilling are too great, and that the fallout of another large-scale spill could be catastrophic for the environment and coastal economies — especially if it’s near Florida.
‘It was a cesspool’
Two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon spill, Jarvis woke up, checked an announcement from NOAA Fisheries and realized he was out of a job. As oil continued to gush from the uncapped well, federal officials had temporarily shut down fishing in parts of the Gulf. The summer season, which sustains tourism-based coastal businesses through lean winters, was over before the first day of summer ever arrived. Florida fishermen, hotel managers and restaurant owners started to panic as they watched their livelihoods disappear.
Some fishers were able to stay afloat through BP’s Vessels of Opportunity program, which paid private boats to clean up spilled oil. Jarvis got on the program immediately. He called it “hush money.”
Aboard the “Backdown 2,” Jarvis spent two months straight cleaning the Gulf.
“It was a cesspool,” he said.
Oil coated patches of sargassum seaweed and the wings of seabirds. Fishers could smell the petrol fumes before they could see them. Day after day, they skimmed the reddish-brown sweet crude from the waves and pumped it from their nets.
The work was grueling — but at least they were getting paid. Fishers who didn’t get on the program went months without work, a devastating blow for those who were already suffering financial hardships from the 2008 recession. Some had to sell their boats. Others found a new line of work. One of Jarvis’ fisherman buddies, Allen “Rookie” Kruse, struggled with the loss of his profession and life’s passion. He committed suicide on the bridge of his boat two months after the spill.
“There’s always a level of uncertainty and adversity every single day of your life as a professional fisherman,” Jarvis said. “But when all of a sudden it’s all taken away, that’s when guys really struggle.”
Florida’s economy lost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, as Americans steered away from beach vacations and Gulf seafood. Researchers estimate that the spill also killed between 600,000 and 800,000 seabirds, as many as 167,000 sea turtles and over a thousand marine mammals like dolphins and whales.
Slapped with lawsuits and hundreds of thousands of claims from individuals and businesses, BP has shelled out over $65 billion in damages so far, and is still making payments.
In Escambia County, one of Florida’s hardest-hit regions, millions of BP settlement dollars have restored wetlands, built stormwater projects and boosted the economy. Since Deepwater Horizon, the county has lost 500 acres of its oyster beds, said Matt Posner, the executive director of the county’s estuary program.
To try and save oysters from an oily fate, Florida officials allowed overharvesting soon after the spill, which decimated beds. Today, only five to 10 percent of historic oyster habitat remains.
“Now we’re left with a legacy issue that is going to take many decades and many millions of dollars in order to restore,” Posner said.
Still, citing a lack of data on Gulf ecosystems, researchers have struggled to measure the disaster’s impacts. Tracey Sutton, director of the DEEPEND Research Consortium, has spent 15 years trying to gauge how deepwater and open-ocean environments have changed.
His team has found that Deepwater Horizon oil reached from the surface down to the bottom of the sea. Fish, shrimp and corals that live deep underwater all took a hit, and still carried oil in their organs as of 2020. Sutton is currently testing samples to see if oil is still present today.
Yet most alarming is the fact that marine mammal species still haven’t recovered, Sutton said. Sperm whales have washed ashore emaciated from a lack of prey, and dolphins, too, have died or failed to reproduce. Constant activity in the Gulf — much of it from oil and gas drilling — is preventing species from returning to their pre-Deepwater Horizon numbers, Sutton said.
“You have to leave them alone for 20 or 30 years for recovery,” Sutton said. “And yet we’re not leaving everything alone.”
“The people of Florida just don’t want it”
For a time, Florida was part of the oil craze. In other Gulf states like Louisiana and Texas, oil had taken off — and prospectors thought Florida was ripe for the drilling. The state even began offering a $50,000 bounty to the first company who struck oil.
Starting in the early 1900s, wildcatters searched for ‘black gold’ from Pensacola down to the Florida Keys. In the hunt for petroleum, oil companies drilled dozens of exploratory wells and burned millions of dollars. One oil man suggested changing the Florida Keys’ local song from “The shrimp boats are a comin’” to “The Wildcatters are a thumpin’.”
But as most holes came back dry, the industry began to abandon some of its drilling efforts in Florida. And by the 80’s, offshore drilling had become wildly unpopular among Floridians. In 1982, Congress passed its first moratorium on oil drilling in the Eastern Gulf, followed by more federal and state-level bans to keep rigs away from the Sunshine State.
While other Gulf states built oil refineries on their shores, Florida erected condominiums and resorts, developing an economy dependent on a pristine coastline. Republican politicians in Florida praised offshore drilling, but bristled at any mention of bringing it to their neck of the Gulf. Drilling still happens on land in some parts of the state, but Florida’s contribution to America’s oil supply is meager compared to other Gulf states.
Trump, who has his own Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, once shared the state’s oil aversion. During his first term, Trump signed a moratorium preventing oil and gas leases in the Eastern Gulf until 2032.
“The people of Florida just don’t want it,” Trump said at the time.
A changed industry?
Fifteen years after Deepwater Horizon, BP has mostly recovered and is launching new enterprises. The company plans two new projects using “20K technology” or technology that can drill in pressures up to 20,000 pounds per square inch. Previously limited to projects that could only withstand 15,000 psi — one being Deepwater Horizon — companies are now drilling in parts of the Gulf that were once unreachable.
Chevron, the first company to begin using 20K technology in August 2024, is tapping into wells over six miles beneath the surface.
BP is awaiting federal approval for its Kaskida project, which would be in the company’s first new oilfield since Deepwater Horizon and could start producing 80,000 barrels of oil per day by 2029. The company also announced another 20K project, Tiber-Guadalupe, in September. The projects will be 250 and 300 miles southwest of New Orleans, respectively.
“BP is committed to developing our Kaskida project in the Gulf of America and continuing our significant investment in US energy production,” company spokesperson Paul Takahashi wrote in response to a list of questions. “The safety of our people and the environment will remain our highest priority throughout this project and in all our operations.”
Since Deepwater Horizon, BP says it has improved engineering, training and safety measures.
The spill is recognized in the industry as a preventable disaster on several fronts. The well had a faulty design to begin with, and operators either ignored or didn’t recognize early warning signs. Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer, which is supposed to be a failsafe, failed. BP also didn’t have immediate access to a capping stack, a failsafe to the failsafe.
After Deepwater Horizon, the federal government tightened regulations on the industry, requiring better well designs, safety measures and transparency.
The government conducts random emergency simulations on companies to make sure they’re prepared for a potential blowout. During these practice runs, companies have proven their ability to respond to a spill in days, not weeks, according to an offshore energy executive who was granted anonymity to speak freely. The possibility of another blowout is slim to none, the executive said.
Though they said the industry’s record post-Deepwater Horizon is “incredibly safe,” the executive acknowledged that, “The risk is still there, and we have to realize it’s there every day.”
In terms of 20K technology, the executive said drilling deeper isn’t inherently riskier, and the industry is well-prepared to prevent accidents.
Companies are required to report any leak, even the slightest sheen on the water, to the federal government. According to the executive, companies continually monitor temperature and pressure trends to detect leaks as soon as possible. And when small incidents do happen, they said, they’re inconsequential enough to have little impact on the environment.
But environmentalists and marine scientists are skeptical that 20K technology won’t result in a serious blowout.
“You cannot ever prevent something like that,” said Steven Murawski, a marine ecologist at the University of South Florida. “This is right at the cutting edge of technology and the environment. It’s a very challenging environment. And the quantities of oil involved are just phenomenal.”
Murawski, who was Chief Scientist at NOAA Fisheries during Deepwater Horizon, said even though the industry and the government have beefed up safety measures and regulations, a major blowout is still very possible.
A 2023 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that vast safety improvements have been made since Deepwater Horizon, but there’s little evidence that the industry is widely promoting a culture of workplace safety.
Even if blowouts can be prevented, smaller-scale spills can have a serious impact on the Gulf, Murawski said. Similarly to how a person can handle a couple of cocktails, marine environments can metabolize a certain amount of oil. But even for organisms that have adapted to consume petroleum, the frequency and severity of spills are too intoxicating.
“There’s a latent group of oil-eating microbes that are there,” Murawski said. “But there’s no way that they can just somehow regulate the population so that it automatically takes everything out of the system.”
Despite the mandated reporting, energy companies don’t always include an estimate of how much oil was spilled, and the federal government does not provide public data for how much accidentally spills into the Gulf each year. Nonprofit organizations make their own estimates, but the data are incomplete and limited.
For some environmental groups, BP’s new Kaskida project raises particular concerns. In a comment letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is in charge of approving or denying BP’s proposal, environmental groups argued that BP hadn’t adequately prepared for the risks and had underestimated the effects of Kaskida’s failure.
In its proposal, BP estimates that a worst-case scenario for Kaskida would result in a spill of about 45,000 barrels of oil per day for 90 days — a total of about 170 million gallons. Deepwater Horizon spilled about 210 million gallons. The industry says its worst-case estimates are generous, and a major blowout is highly unlikely. The environmental group Earthjustice argues BP’s worst-case scenario is too conservative.
“BP failed to demonstrate that it really has the experience or expertise necessary to conduct safe operations,” Brettny Hardy, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, said in an interview.
Florida’s future
The scientific consensus on climate change finds that fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal are the largest contributors to long-term shifts in average temperatures and weather patterns being seen around the world. While Florida might not have any rigs near its shore, the Sunshine State often suffers some of the greatest climate consequences. Record-breaking Gulf temperatures helped make recent hurricanes more severe. Sea level rise threatens to inundate coastal communities, impacting millions of Floridians. Extreme heat days, defined as days at or above 95° Fahrenheit, are projected to steadily rise.
During his administration, former President Joe Biden invested heavily in greener sources of energy like wind and solar, while trying to move away from petroleum. Under Biden, the government planned to hold only three new Gulf lease sales in a five-year period, the fewest number in federal history. Biden also permanently withdrew the Eastern Gulf from future oil and gas leases.
Trump revoked Biden’s earlier memorandum on the Gulf in January, and has promised to deregulate the oil and gas industry. Phrases like “unleashing American energy” and “energy dominance” have become a mantra.
In addition to the lease sales proposed last week, the administration announced in August a minimum of 30 more sales in the Gulf over the next 15 years, with the first taking place Dec. 10. Environmental groups are suing the administration for not performing environmental assessments before the sales.
Still, while the federal government is hungry to pump more oil out of the Gulf, the industry might not share the same appetite, said Charles Mason, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who testified during the national Deepwater Horizon court case. More leases doesn’t necessarily mean more drilling, he said, especially when onshore methods like fracking are considerably cheaper.
“What we really want to see is, is there robust activity and interest in these leases, and are they putting a lot of money on the table?” Mason added. “And my impression is that there might be buzz, but I don’t think they’re following through with a lot of money on the table.”
Trump’s new leases are taking oil and gas “back to status quo,” after the Biden administration stalled the industry, said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), an offshore energy lobbying group.
“We’re competing globally, and what President Trump has been doing is helping us get back into a competitive state with the rest of the regions around the world,” Milito said. “But it’s going to take some time.”
Under the federal government’s new proposal, oil and gas drilling would be allowed roughly 100 miles from Florida’s coast. Lease sales in the newly dubbed “South-Central” planning area would be held in 2029 and 2030.
The proposal is preliminary, and still faces multiple public comment periods and revisions, meaning the final plan is still months away.
Milito praised the new proposal, and said opening parts of the Eastern Gulf to drilling is necessary for the country’s energy leadership. However, Milito said the industry isn’t interested in drilling close to Florida due to the state’s strong opposition and lack of onshore infrastructure, and only wants to wildcat in the Eastern Gulf’s deep waters. While the industry is focused on the Central Gulf for now, eventually those reserves are going to run dry.
“If we want to be able to have supplies of energy to fuel our economy in 15, 20, 30 years, then it’s going to be important for us to take steps to understand what the resources might be in other areas,” he said.
But the closer the industry gets to Florida, the more likely an oil spill would damage the state’s coastlines, scientists say. The Gulf Loop Current, a massive force of warm water that follows Florida’s Gulf Coast and snakes through the Keys, is near where oil companies are seeking to drill. Even if a major oil spill happened 100 miles from Florida’s coast, the loop current could bring it to the state’s shallows, said Tracey Sutton, the deepwater researcher.
“The farther east you go, the more the loop current is likely to grab that oil and take it right through the Keys,” Sutton said.
The administration’s new plan would risk the health and livelihoods of coastal citizens, Earthjustice attorney Brettny Hardy said, and would devastate marine ecosystems.
If the oil industry does step toward Florida, it’ll have a sea of political and local opposition to cross. Environmentalists, the tourism industry and Gulf residents are fierce protectors of the state’s white sand beaches. The American military, which has several testing sites and bases on the Gulf Coast, isn’t too keen on oil rigs either.
Florida’s Republican politicians are pro-fossil fuel — just not in sight of Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a ban on drilling along the Apalachicola River in June after a statewide campaign from environmentalists, Florida locals and bipartisan legislators. Florida Senators Rick Scott and Ashley Moody recently introduced a bill alongside Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would codify Trump’s 2020 Eastern Gulf moratorium into law.
U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican who represents the St. Petersburg area, said she wants to keep the Eastern Gulf moratorium in place. Luna supports all forms of energy production, including fossil fuels, but said she wants to keep Florida’s shores “free of ugly oil rigs.”
Before the federal government announced its new proposal, Luna said she was confident the Trump administration wouldn’t lift the moratorium.
Last week’s announcement sparked a flurry of opposition from some of Florida’s most prominent Republicans. Eight U.S. representatives, including Byron Donalds, Jimmy Patronis and Laurel Lee, signed a letter Thursday urging Trump to reverse course. DeSantis said he wanted the administration to keep the current moratorium in place.
Gary Jarvis, the commercial fisherman, was mayor of Destin from 2018 to 2022 and is a registered Republican. Jarvis supports the oil industry, he said — rigs make for good fishing and energy companies support thousands of jobs. But after seeing the effects of Deepwater Horizon, he wants the industry to stay far away from Florida.
“I like oil rigs,” Jarvis said. “But just not in my backyard.”
