Florida Considers Onshore Oil as Offshore Opportunities Dwindle

As President-elect Donald Trump takes aim at the Biden administration’s new offshore oil and gas drilling ban, one area will likely remain off-limits: the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s coast.

But a high-profile onshore oil project is inching closer to reality, even if drilling is largely taboo in the Sunshine State.

Florida regulators are poised to grant a permit for a Louisiana-based company to drill an exploratory well in the Panhandle, raising the hackles of environmentalists who say oil production in the area could threaten the region’s fishing and oyster industries and ruin an environmentally sensitive area.

Observers say a drilling boom is not on the way in Florida, with attempts to drill exploratory wells after the 1970s and 1980s often drawing bipartisan condemnation. Despite Trump’s pledges to open federal lands and more offshore waters to drilling — and Florida’s widespread support for him — oil and gas production mostly remains a nonstarter in the Sunshine State.

“I just don’t think public opinion in Florida is going to support any type of leases off of Florida,” said Jamie Miller, a political consultant who has previously served as the executive director of the Republican Party of Florida. “Clean water and protecting land and certainly protecting beaches, and the economic impact of protecting beaches, has huge bipartisan support here.”

The idea of onshore drilling, Miller said, is “a little bit of a different challenge.”

Last year, companies across the state produced a combined 682,945 barrels of oil and 8.25 billion cubic feet of natural gas — a small amount compared with national fossil production leader Texas, which produced 162.5 million of barrels of oil and over 1 trillion cubic feet of gas in August 2024 alone. 

Still, further onshore oil and gas reserves remain attractive to some small operators. That includes the permitting request to drill an exploratory well about 1.5 miles northwest of the Apalachicola River.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in April said it intended to approve a permit application from Clearwater Land & Minerals to drill a 14,000-foot exploratory well about 35 miles north of Apalachicola Bay.

The Bay has long been tied to shellfishing and oysters. But in 2013, the oyster population in the area began to collapse. For several years before that, an average of 2.6 million pounds were harvested annually. By 2019, the harvest resulted in less than 21,000 pounds of oysters, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The collapse was the result of drought and a reduced flow from the Apalachicola River that sparked a water war between farmers upriver in Georgia and the Florida state government. The state has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting for water flow to be restored to the river and millions more on oyster restoration efforts.

After the state environmental department announced it intended to approve the permit, state Sen. Corey Simon, a Republican from Tallahassee, voiced his displeasure with the DEP’s support of the project in a post on X.

“It is unconscionable that efforts to drill for oil are happening at the same time that we are fighting for the revitalization of the Apalachicola Bay,” he wrote. “We cannot allow the actions of one irresponsible body to impact the limited precious natural resources that belong to the entire region.”

Hundreds of protesters showed up to a hearing in Tallahassee over the permit, where the Florida DEP and Clearwater Land & Minerals defended the permit in an administrative court hearing against concerns raised by the Apalachicola Riverkeeper environmental group.

However, the state is considering buying the land where the drilling site has been proposed, which would effectively kill the Panhandle project.

It remains to be seen how the project will progress, both in terms of a permit from the Florida DEP and a possible land sale.

An official from Clearwater Land & Minerals, who declined to give his name, said the company would not comment on the project.

“At this time we’re not discussing it, not that we won’t sometime here in the near future,” he said last week. “Maybe in next month or two we maybe more open to discussing it.”

The Florida DEP did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition team pointed to a news conference Trump held on Jan. 7, during which he said he would reverse Biden’s offshore drilling ban “immediately.” He did not specifically mention Florida or the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

“I will revoke the offshore oil, gas drilling ban in vast areas on day one,” Trump said at the event.

Decades of drilling

Floridians were not always averse to oil production.

As states across the Southeast were striking some oil reserves in the 1920s and 1930s, Florida state lawmakers put a $50,000 bounty on finding oil within state lines. That bounty was eventually claimed by Humble Oil and Refining Co., which later became Exxon Mobil, when operators struck oil in 1943 just north of the Everglades and 40 miles east of Naples.

What came to be known as the Sunniland oil field wasn’t developed until the 1950s due to World War II, but its discovery breathed life into efforts to find oil in and around Florida, said Thomas Herbert, a professional geologist and vice president of Tallahassee-based Lampl Herbert Consultants.

Soon reserves were found from the East Coast around Dade County across the state to just east of Fort Myers.

Decades later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, operators found oil in town of Jay, Florida, right on edge of the Panhandle by Alabama.

“Exxon made an absolute showcase out of it, they said it was the largest field east of the Mississippi River,” Herbert said. “What that did in the industry is it told the promoters that people who were looking for more oil to needed to get some acreage and go drill, wildcat that well.”

About 600 million barrels of oil equivalent in fluids and natural gas came out of about 100 wells drilled around Jay, with about 20 still in operation today, Herbert said.

Bruce Wells, founder and president of the American Oil & Gas Historical Society, pointed to a map kept by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection that shows the number of wells drilled around Florida. The vast majority of them ended up being dry holes, or wells that were drilled but never ended producing either oil or gas.

“It gives an idea how little was drilled compared to the pin cushions of Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Texas,” Wells said.

Part of the issue was a matter of geology, Wells said.

The Jay oil field was prolific thanks to subterranean structures that connected it to the prolific Smackover Formation that spans from Arkansas to Florida, Herbert said, and caused oil to flow from parts of the eastern Gulf into a chasm underneath part of Florida’s Panhandle.

Much of the rest of the state hasn’t shown much promise for oil production, according to Herbert. About a half dozen wells were drilled in Southwest Florida around 2010 trying to find more oil near Sunniland, but they weren’t successful and those wells are being plugged now, Herbert said. And the oil produced in South Florida was heavy and laden with sulfur – making it harder to refine and transport.

Oil found offshore in the eastern Gulf, however, is a different story. The American Petroleum Institute in 2017 estimated production could reach more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent a day within 20 years, and that companies could produce cumulatively 2.86 billion barrels of oil equivalent a day over 20 years.

Holly Hopkins, API’s vice president of upstream policy, said in a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News that producing oil and gas in the Gulf region is critical for meeting U.S. energy demand and supporting domestic jobs.

“Restricting access in the Gulf limits the potential to boost domestic energy production, strengthen U.S. energy leadership and provide the affordable, reliable energy American families need,” she wrote.

But a political firewall stands in the way between Florida offshore production and those billions of barrels of crude.

Oil doesn’t mix?

As the oil fields in South Florida began to produce less, and major players like Exxon left in the 1980s and 1990s, public opinion soured against the industry.

Miller, the political consultant, said much of the contempt comes down to the pillars of the state’s economy.

“Florida’s historic economy has been agriculture, tourism, and I like to say the elderly since air conditioning — and under elderly you can put health care and homebuilding,” Miller said. “None of those three mixes well with oil.”

Efforts across three decades to expand oil and gas drilling in Florida have failed.

Most recently, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning fracking in Florida and another blocking drilling off the state’s coastal waters.

Those actions prompted former Secretary of State Nikki Haley to criticize DeSantis during a Republican primary debate in 2023, accusing DeSantis of being “a liberal when it comes to the environment” while highlighting Florida’s fracking and offshore drilling bans.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to drill in the Florida Everglades. And I know most Floridians agree with me,” DeSantis said at the debate.

The Florida governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about his stance on oil and gas production in the state.

But Trump, the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, himself banned drilling off the coast of Florida.

Trump extended a drilling moratorium for offshore areas off the coast of Florida in September 2020. Those areas included the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida and the South Atlantic. That action withdrew those areas from consideration for any leasing purposes for exploration, development or production through June 30, 2032.

Miller said Trump’s opposition to drilling off the Florida coast makes sense.

About 76 percent of Floridians live within coastal counties, and the state remains a top choice for retirement according to groups such as AARP. Miller said people who sell off almost all their assets to invest Florida homes aren’t eager to see oil derricks or pump jacks near their neighborhoods or drilling platforms off the beaches — and they likely wouldn’t support candidates who did either.

“Donald Trump lives in Florida, he has a beach front house in Florida, he understands the coastal communities here,” Jamie said.

Elected representatives are hesitant, too.

If you got 30 members of Congress from Florida and put offshore drilling up to a vote, Herbert said, 28 would likely vote against it.

Among them would be Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Republican whose district includes Manatee County along Florida’s Gulf Coast. In a statement to E&E News, he said the U.S. can protect Florida’s Gulf Coast from offshore drilling while remaining the number oil and gas producer in the world.

“I look forward to working with the incoming Trump administration to expand domestic energy production while continuing to protect Florida’s Gulf Coast from offshore drilling to preserve our tourism-based economy and allow for military training and testing activities that are essential to U.S. military readiness,” Buchanan wrote.