"The district court committed legal error and abused its discretion in issuing its preliminary injunction order," according to the filing.

On June 22, Federal Court Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the federal government's decision to ban drilling activity in water deeper than 500 feet for six months was "arbitrary and capricious" and would lead to irreparable harm to companies operating in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico.

Feldman's ruling followed a suit asking for relief from the moratorium from a dozen offshore companies, including Hornbeck Offshore.

In its arguments for a stay, the government said the "district court second-guessed [the Department of the Interior's] decisions and held that the challenged suspensions were 'blanket, generic, indeed punitive.' The district court erred, and Interior respectfully requests that this court issue a stay of the district court's order."

The filing also argues that the court "overruled those decisions and substituted its own views about the proper balance of risk and cost."

The government says in its filing that the deepwater suspensions "are crucially important to protect human health and the environment from another deepwater drilling disaster while Interior investigates the Deepwater Horizon event and acts to prevent another similar disaster from happening."

The government argues against Hornbeck's filing with the court that the moratorium will harm it by using Hornbeck's own statements made to investors.

"Just before challenging the suspension orders, Hornbeck filed a statement telling investors that only 21 of its 55-vessel 'upstream' fleet was supporting deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf," the government filing said.

"Of these 21 vessels, only nine were operating under time charter contracts. Hornbeck told investors that it would 'mitigate its exposure' to the uncertainties in the regulatory environment 'by bidding additional vessels into foreign markets and domestic non-oilfield markets,' and that it remained 'reasonably optimistic about its ability to further diversify its revenue base," the filing said.

The motion for a stay is accompanied by a declaration from Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in which he says that an injunction "will allow risky drilling in deepwater conditions to resume, relying on blowout preventers resting on the seafloor hundreds of thousands of feet below the surface, difficult to access in the event they fail to function as intended."

He added: "If [the government] is denied the ability to suspend operations while enhanced technology is installed and tough regulatory standards are put in place, it has no means of insisting that its lessees operate with a greater margin of safety than BP and Transocean did."

--Pam Radtke Russell, newsdesk@platts.com