A dozen miles off the coast, on a rusty, aging platform, workers in hard hats and overalls spend their days extracting oil and gas from the ocean floor before retreating at night into tiny weather-beaten steel cubes that act as dorms. The platform, owned by a Houston-based energy company that until recently was bankrupt, has none of the grandeur — or profits — of the deep-sea structures over 100 miles offshore that are operated by international giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. But the company, Energy XXI , and other struggling operators in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico are beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s efforts to increase offshore production here — in large part by upending financial, environmental and safety regulations that the […]