The Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce is among the business groups that joined a legal brief backing a federal court decision to lift the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, part of the response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster earlier that year.
The National Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed the amicus brief in Hornbeck Offshore Services, Inc. v. Salazar, the case brought by Gulf drilling and marine services companies challenging the moratorium the Interior Department imposed after the April 2010 rig explosion and oil spill. A federal judge had already blocked the moratorium, and the government was appealing that ruling when the brief was filed.
Along with the U.S. Chamber and the Mobile chamber, the brief was supported by 29 other Gulf Coast business and industry groups, the Business Council of Alabama, and U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. The coalition argued that federal regulators had not adequately weighed the economic damage a prolonged shutdown would inflict on drilling crews, support businesses and coastal economies still absorbing the effects of the spill itself.
Stakes for the Local Economy
Mobile’s port and manufacturing base include suppliers and service companies tied to offshore energy work, giving the Mobile Area Chamber a direct financial interest in how long deepwater exploration stayed paused. Business groups on the Gulf Coast had warned that an extended moratorium threatened thousands of jobs on rigs and in the onshore companies that support them, at a time when the same region’s tourism and fishing industries were already reeling from the spill.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately declined to reinstate the moratorium, siding with the drilling companies and the business groups that had intervened in the case. The Interior Department later replaced the blanket moratorium with a new permitting process for deepwater drilling.