WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama moved Tuesday to open the Atlantic Ocean to drilling, beginning a mammoth battle over the environmental effects and raising the question of how much oil and gas lies under the sea and whether it’s even economical for it to be drilled.

The Interior Department announced Tuesday that it was proposing a lease sale off the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia as part of its new offshore leasing plan, which covers 2017 to 2022. At the same time, the department said it would ban drilling in some environmentally sensitive areas off Alaska.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell called it a balanced plan that allows energy development “while protecting areas that are simply too special to develop.”

The proposal will incite a furious debate over just what American places are considered too special for drilling rigs — pitting environmental groups against industry as well as some coastal towns against their state leaders, who see jobs and the potential for billions in revenue.

“It will be a battle royal,” said Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington.

Ebinger expects lawsuits to rage for years. Jewell said the Atlantic drilling lease sale won’t happen until 2021 and could change or even be scrapped.

Sierra Weaver, an attorney at the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, said she hopes communities along the Atlantic seaboard will band together against the drilling plan. Weaver argued that Obama’s proposal sells out the Southeast, putting at risk the tourism and fishing economies of coastal communities that rely on having clean beaches and water.

“The Obama administration just made the point that these special areas of Alaska are too special to drill,” Weaver said. “The same goes for the Southeast.”

The proposed lease area is a huge swath from Virginia to the southern border of Georgia, but it could be narrowed. So it’s not clear whether drilling might happen off the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the Charleston waterfront in South Carolina, or the port of Savannah in Georgia.

Mayors of coastal towns including Charleston, Beaufort, S.C., and communities on the Outer Banks have spoken out against Atlantic drilling.

The governors of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, though, pushed hard for the drilling to be allowed, and Jewell said that made a difference. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory called the plan “a step in the right direction to help North Carolina become a significant energy-producing state.” But McCrory criticized as too limiting a 50-mile buffer between drilling and the East Coast that’s included in the proposal.