Ruling in favor of the British drilling company Ensco, Judge Feldman ordered the Interior Department to decide within 30 days whether to approve five drilling permits sought by the company over the last year.

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A spokeswoman for the bureau said that officials were reviewing the judge’s decision and would have no immediate comment.

The decision came as a consortium of oil companies said Thursday that they had completed an interim emergency plan to respond to a gulf spill like the one in April caused by a BP blowout. The consortium, known as the Marine Well Containment Company, which includes BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell, is hoping to convince the government that the industry is ready to start drilling again in the Gulf of Mexico.

The plan includes a 100-ton stack of steel valves designed to plug a well under the sea or funnel escaping oil up to the surface. The consortium said the device could capture or otherwise handle 60,000 barrels a day, roughly comparable to estimates of the amount of oil that poured from BP’s Macondo well last year.

Federal inspectors have been observing and reviewing test results of the capping device.

Regulators cautiously welcomed the announcement by the consortium.

“We appreciate Marine Well Containment Company’s significant progress to address this issue,” Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the ocean energy bureau, said in a statement. “And we continue to encourage them to make their containment system available as quickly as possible to deepwater operators so that new, responsible oil and gas drilling in deepwater can proceed.”

At a conference at Rice University last week, Michael R. Bromwich, the head of the bureau, said the government was working cooperatively with the industry. But he expressed doubts that permitting would be as speedy in the future as it was before the BP accident. “It would simply be irresponsible,” he said, to move forward without a new industry containment plan firmly in place.

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A second industry emergency response plan being developed by the Helix Energy Solutions Group is expected to be ready next month.

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Meanwhile, the lack of new permit approvals is taking its toll on some drilling companies. Seahawk Drilling, a major shallow-water gas driller, filed for bankruptcy protection last week, and other companies have moved some of their rigs abroad.

Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said that the oil industry had done what the government demanded of it by designing a new system to reduce the likelihood of another major spill.

“Now that we have the safety measures in place,” Mr. Upton said in a statement, “it’s time for the Obama administration to let the gulf get back to work.”

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Oil industry officials said that the ruling and progress on containment technology should be sufficient to end the de facto ban on new drilling in the gulf.

“Feldman’s ruling is further evidence that the time to begin issuing permits is now,” said Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group representing offshore drillers and suppliers. “The court has spoken — the containment technology is there.”

Also Thursday, the investigative commission appointed by President Obama to study causes of the gulf oil spill released a detailed report concluding that the accident was a result of a breakdown of company management and government oversight.

The panel’s co-chairmen — Bob Graham, a former senator from Florida, and William K. Reilly, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency — said that the report “lays out the confusion, lack of communication, disorganization and inattention to crucial safety issues and test results that led to the deaths of 11 men and the largest offshore oil spill in our nation’s history.”