The nation’s top offshore drilling regulators will visit the Offshore Technology Conference on Wednesday to tour the massive exhibit floor where more than 2,000 companies have their wares on display. The newly sworn-in interior secretary, Sally Jewell, will make an appearance, alongside Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement director James Watson and Tommy Beaudreau, the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.  More »

The Obama administration would be forced to sell offshore drilling leases off the coast of Virginia under a bill introduced in the House on Friday.  More »

Lawmakers took a modest step Thursday toward enacting a one-year-old agreement between the United States and Mexico that promises to unleash oil drilling along the nations’ maritime boundary in the Gulf.  More »

Oil and gas companies will have a chance to buy drilling rights on more than 21 million acres in the western Gulf of Mexico during a lease sale in August.  More »

Oil companies seeking to drill in Arctic waters must have emergency equipment capable of reining in runaway subsea wells, a top Obama administration official said, answering a question facing ConocoPhillips and other firms with drilling rights in the region.  More »

ConocoPhillips on Wednesday said it would abandon its plans to begin drilling for oil in Arctic waters north of Alaska because of “uncertainties of evolving federal regulatory requirements” for oil exploration in the region. The move follows similar decisions by Statoil and Shell, which is pausing its own Arctic oil hunt after experiencing several high-profile mishaps last year.  More »

Federal regulators have focused scrutiny on Shell’s Arctic drilling program, but top Obama administration officials say ConocoPhillips and other companies planning to search for oil in the same area better be paying attention.  More »

Embattled British oil giant BP, one of the largest leaseholder in the Gulf of Mexico, skipped Wednesday’s high-stakes lease sale, amid ongoing legal troubles and disputes with federal regulators over the fallout from the 2010 oil spill.  More »

The federal government is kicking off an auction of leases to drill in the central Gulf of Mexico today, but it probably won’t look much like last year’s sale of similar territory, when pent-up, post-spill demand spurred a buying frenzy.  More »

The Obama administration on Thursday released the findings of a high-level probe of Shell’s problem-plagued 2012 Arctic drilling season that could dictate what energy companies must do to safeguard future oil exploration in the region.  More »

Northeast lawmakers are asking the Obama administration to abandon a plan to allow energy companies to conduct seismic research to identify hidden pockets of potential oil and gas along the Atlantic Coast. The Interior Department is on track to make a decision about allowing those seismic surveys as early as March.  More »

The federal government has opened a probe into the grounding of Shell’s Arctic drilling rig Kulluk, and investigation that could set back the company’s multibillion-dollar effort to explore in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas.  More »