President Barack Obama made an announcement last month about a new energy plan which includes a huge new expansion of oil and natural gas drilling along the eastern, southern and Alaskan shores of the United States. The declaration, made at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., ushered an end to a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling on the Eastern seaboard. Some 167 million acres of ocean, from Delaware to mid-Florida, will be opened up for exploration and gas and oil extraction.

This announcement has drawn criticisms and ire from the nation's environmentalists who have fought to protect U.S. coastal areas, opposing Obama’s plan. However, Open for oil company exploration and drilling commencing 2011 to 2017 will be new areas of coastal Virginia and other parts of the mid-Atlantic region, and two-thirds of the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. The plan also includes feasibility studies for drilling in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, his internal Department withdrew a Bush administration proposal for drilling from 2012 to 2017, which led to hope that the president was genuinely concerned about correcting environmental problems.

During his election campaign, Obama had publicly supported the decision to increase offshore drilling. And in his recent State of the Union address on Jan. 27, Obama stated that weaning the country from imported oil would require “tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.”

This decision grants the highly profitable oil corporations one of the biggest items on their wish list - access to the vast regions of the outer continental shelf for drilling. But environmental and conservation advocates and activists, as well as many residents of affected states, have widely denounced the plan, contending that it will lead to an increase in oil spills and the destruction of fragile ecosystems.

In spite of extensive resistance to increased offshore drilling from rank-and-file environmentalists and Republican Party politicians in the affected areas, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar developed the administration’s plan after conducting four public meetings over the past year in Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Jersey.

Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director had this to say: “the oil industry already has access to drilling on millions of acres of America’s public lands and water. We don’t need to hand over our last protected pristine coastal areas just so oil companies can break more profit records.”

Greenpeace executive director Phil Radford said: “…… While China and Germany are winning the clean energy race, this act furthers [the U.S.’s] addiction to oil. Expanding offshore drilling in areas that have been protected for decades threatens our oceans and the coastal communities that depend on them with devastating oil spills, more pollution and climate change.” (Associated Press, April 1) T. Boone Pickens, the chair and CEO of PB Capital highlighted his opinion saying: “I heard some guy on TV said [the plan] accesses you to 14 billion barrels immediately.... There’s not 14 billion barrels there to be accessed to. I would say that East Coast, Anwar [Alaska National Wildlife Reserve] and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, all added up, I would be surprised if you could get one to two million barrels a day out of it …... we’re importing daily 14 million barrels of oil and we’re producing seven in the United States. So, we’re importing two-thirds of what we use.”

Meanwhile other experts and analysts expressed that, the United States has every right to utilize its natural offshore oil resources the same way Norway and Brazil do.

By some estimates, the potential reserve could yield between 4.5 and 22 billion barrels of oil and 13 to 95 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. While this is not enough to solve the energy needs of the United States, it can be part of a larger strategy combined with nuclear energy to develop a long-term plan for alternative energy.

Based on reports, president Obama appears to be using expanded offshore exploration as a negotiating chip in his administration’s attempts to enact sweeping legislation to curb both oil imports and greenhouse gas emissions.