Oil Drillers May Face Months of Delay Even After Ban
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Oil and natural-gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico may remain idle for months even if President Barack Obama’s administration agrees to an early end for its moratorium on deep-water drilling.
“In some ways it doesn’t matter when the moratorium comes off, because there are other impediments to drilling now,” Jim Tisch, chief executive officer of Loews Corp., said in an interview today at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. Loews owns 50 percent of Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., the largest U.S. deep-water oil driller.