They appeared in the spring, a secretive group trying to upend Florida's longtime ban on offshore drilling by promising millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs.

The effort to allow drilling within three to 10 miles of beaches failed to pass the Legislature, but only just. Now emissaries from Florida Energy Associates are touring the state to campaign for overturning the ban at the next legislative session, either this fall or next spring. Incoming House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Orlando, says he'll sponsor a bill to allow drilling as close as five miles offshore.

But if Florida Energy Associates gets its wish, what will Florida get? According to company officials, residents will see:

• Drilling for oil, not gas, but in only limited areas along the gulf coast, including off Pasco and Hernando counties and up in the Panhandle. However, there could be no drilling off Pinellas County's beaches, in the Keys or anywhere along the Atlantic coast.

• Blue-collar crew jobs on the rigs, but nothing for supervisors, who will likely be imported from Louisiana. The rigs will also require supplies ferried in by boats, not helicopters.

• Construction work building underwater pipelines - the source of most offshore spills - to carry the oil to Louisiana.

• No refineries, but some on-shore facilities such as a plant to separate oil from the pollution-laden water that comes up with it. That could create further debates about siting such a facility.

M. Lance Phillips, the Texas oilman leading the charge to overturn Florida's ban, says he's sure there's oil within a few miles of the state's white sand beaches.

``It's all in close,'' he said. ``The heart of what we're looking at is in state waters.''

Geological studies and legalities mean the target is the gulf, not the Atlantic coast. But even there, there are obstacles. No one can drill within the state's aquatic preserves, said Doug Daniels, the Daytona Beach attorney representing the oil consortium. That lets out Pinellas County, since the state waters along its famous beaches are part of a preserve.

The Big Bend Seagrasses Aquatic Preserve up along the Nature Coast would block drilling in state waters from Taylor to Levy counties, and the Charlotte Harbor preserve would bar drilling off Charlotte and Lee counties, Daniels said. The Florida Keys are off-limits too, protected as a national marine sanctuary.

BILLIONS OF BARRELS

But rigs could go up anywhere else, he said. That would leave Citrus, Hernando and Pasco counties open, as well as more tourism-dependent Sarasota and Collier counties and virtually all of the Panhandle.

Drilling in those areas could produce ``as much as 16 billion barrels,'' Daniels said. Although the company has put forward more conservative estimates, ``that is more like what we think it would be.'' That's more than 30 times as much oil as has been produced by the largest field ever found in Florida.

Daniels said the estimates are based on numbers from another company that tried to find oil in Florida's waters, Coastal Petroleum. A tiny company backed by Tampa's powerful Lykes Brothers, Coastal obtained 800,000 acres of near-shore leases stretching from Apalachicola to Naples in 1941. It drilled about 20 test wells from seven to 10 miles offshore prior to 1968, but came up dry.

So why does Florida Energy Associates think its luck would be any better?

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