The Obama administration removed the final bureaucratic obstacle preventing Royal Dutch Shell from drilling for oil beneath the Arctic Ocean, clearing the way for the company to complete exploratory wells as soon as this summer.
The approval, granted by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement on Monday, comes after Shell spent nearly eight years and more than $7 billion overcoming regulatory, political, legal and logistical challenges – sometimes of the company’s own making.
The most recent came last month, when damage to a Shell icebreaker prompted the administration to limit Shell to drilling only preliminary top holes to wells, without entering potential oil-bearing zones, until the vessel was repaired.