The Obama administration is lifting the moratorium on deep-water oil drilling — put in place after the Gulf oil spill disaster — for operators who comply with tough new rules and regulations, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday.

“There will always be risks associated with deep-water drilling,” Salazar said. “We have reached a point where we have significantly reduced those risks.”

The six-month moratorium was first issued by Salazar in May after the April 20 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people and triggered one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. An estimated 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons) of oil gushed into the Gulf before the broken well, 5,000 feet below the surface, was capped.

Salazar’s initial moratorium was overturned by a federal judge whose ruling was upheld by an appeals court. The interior secretary then issued a second ban in June that was scheduled to expire in November.

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(Read More: CNN)