Offshore Drilling Set To Begin Off Florida Alarms Environmentalists

President Trump recently signed an order extending a ban on drilling in U.S. waters in the Atlantic. But in the Bahamas, a small company has received permission to begin doing exploratory drilling just 150 miles from the Florida coast.

Bahamas Petroleum Company is headquartered on the Isle of Man, part of the United Kingdom, but has offices in the Bahamas. More importantly, it has leases on potential oil fields covering some 4 million acres in waters between Andros, the nation's largest island, and the north coast of Cuba. A high-tech drill ship, the Stena IceMAX, is expected to be onsite and ready to begin drilling by mid-December.

"It's something that's being rushed into prematurely without adequate environmental protection in place," says Casuarina McKinney-Lambert with the Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation.