Washington (CNN) -- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday that the Obama administration is lifting the moratorium on deep-water oil drilling it put in place after the Gulf oil disaster.
Operators must comply with new rules and regulations in order to get permission to resume drilling, Salazar said.
"There will always be risks associated with deep-water drilling," Salazar said. "We have reached a point where we have significantly reduced those risks".
The six-month moratorium was first issued by Salazar in May after the April 20 explosion of the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon that killed 11 people and triggered one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
When a federal judge overturned the ban and an appeals court agreed, Salazar issued a second ban in June that was scheduled to expire in November.
Critics of the ban, including Republican leaders, Gulf state officials and Gulf coast residents, said it would only hurt oil and gas workers in the already hard-hit coastal communities where hundreds of jobs were lost because of the disaster.
Salazar said the moratorium provided time to make sure similar accidents involving a failed piece of equipment called a blowout preventer wouldn't occur, and that rig operators were prepared to deal with worst-case scenarios if it did happen.
Under the new requirements, operators must show that their proposed development and exploration plans can deal with potential blowouts and undergo detailed inspections and design reviews of blowout preventers by independent third parties, said Michael Bromwich, the new head of the federal agency that oversees offshore oil drilling.
CNN
