Companies begin quest for oil, gas off Florida

And it will take years before the company begins producing anything at the site — and there is no guarantee of success. A company can have as much as $4 billion invested and a wait of up to five years before seeing any return on the investment, Strive said.

"We typically will have $100 to $200 million invested in a project before we know if it is an economic venture or not," he said. "Then, if you know you have made an economic discovery, you spend a billion dollars or more on a facility."

The 1981 moratorium — enacted out of environmental concerns in response to a massive oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast a decade earlier — has prevented the Interior Department from spending money on offshore oil or gas leases in virtually all coastal waters outside the western Gulf of Mexico and in some areas off Alaska.

A political switch
But politicians who once supported the ban are changing their minds.

Sen. John McCain supports lifting the ban and allowing states to decide whether to approve drilling of their shores. Crist, Florida's Republican governor and a possible vice presidential candidate, reversed his long-standing opposition to lifting the ban last month.

The ban won't be lifted without a fight.

Sen. Bill Nelson, who has led opposition to offshore drilling among the state's congressional delegation, criticized the governor for reversing his position, accusing Crist and McCain of putting oil company profits before protecting the state's $65 billion annual tourism industry.

"Oil companies and their allies are using the shockingly high price of oil and gasoline, which largely is the result not of a supply problem but speculative fever, to scare the public into thinking coastal drilling offers a real solution to our dependency on oil," he said in an e-mailed statement.

The 2006 Senate compromise opening up the Panhandle tracts made sense and should be honored by the oil companies, said Dan McLaughlin, Nelson's spokesman. Instead, the companies and Congressional Republicans are pushing to open more acreage, he said. Nelson helped broker the compromise.

"It was a compromise allowing them to go where they wanted to go, where there were some proven reserves, while also keeping them at a distance to save the economy, the environment and protect our military training areas," McLaughlin said.

"That compromise closed the door and kept the moratorium in place. Now you see the governor doing an about face, but we are confident we are going to fight it back again."

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