Fearing that the protections for Florida offered in the Senate’s Lease Sale 181 bill might be gutted if merged with the House’s more expansive bill for drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said he will offer an amendment during debate on the Lease 181 bill this week that will ask senators to reject up-front the competing House offshore bill.

Specifically, Nelson’s amendment would express “the sense of the Senate” that Senate conferees should not be appointed to conference with the House on OCS legislation. Instead, it calls for the House to accept the Senate’s narrower, Florida-friendly Lease 181 bill (S. 3711) without any changes, as a replacement for the comprehensive OCS bill that the House passed in June (see Daily GPI, June 30). Nelson’s amendment is likely to get a chilly reception in both the Senate and House.

“If the Senate position, providing protections for Florida’s economy and environment, is at risk in negotiations with House members, then I can’t support sending something over to them for a series of closed-door negotiations,” Nelson said Monday. Because Republican Senate leaders have yet to give Nelson a public guarantee that the bill would not be altered in negotiations with the House, Nelson said he has opted to seek assurances directly from his Senate colleagues.

The Senate is now scheduled to hold a cloture vote early Wednesday on whether to proceed with debate on its more limited OCS measure, which would open up more than eight million acres in the Lease 181 region in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in a tract south of Lease 181 to oil and natural gas producers. Sixty votes will be needed to begin debate on the measure, sponsored by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM). The bill establishes a 125-mile, no-drill buffer for Florida’s northwest coast through 2022, and a ban on drilling 235 miles west of Tampa to protect military training ranges in the Gulf of Mexico. The protections have the backing of both Nelson and Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL).

But the Florida senators are opposed to the House OCS bill (HR 4761), which is significantly broader in scope. It would give coastal states complete control over whether to allow leasing within 100 miles of their coasts, and would remove the moratorium on drilling beyond that 100-mile mark. The House bill would require coastal states to get the approval of their governors, legislatures and neighboring states to begin leasing. Unlike the Senate measure, it does not offer special protections for Florida.

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