President Joe Biden is indefinitely blocking offshore oil and gas development in more than 625 million acres of US coastal waters, warning that drilling there is simply “not worth the risks” and “unnecessary” to meet the nation’s energy needs.
Biden is ruling out future oil and gas leasing along the US East and West Coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and a sliver of the Northern Bering Sea — an area teeming with seabirds, marine mammals, fish and other wildlife that indigenous people have depended on for millennia. The action doesn’t affect energy development under existing offshore leases, and it won’t prevent the sale of more drilling rights in Alaska’s gas-rich Cook Inlet or the central and western Gulf of Mexico, which together provide about 14% of US oil and gas production.
“It is clear to me that the relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” Biden said in a statement. “We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient and the food they produce secure — and keeping energy prices low.”
Some of the areas Biden is protecting were already withdrawn from oil and gas leasing by Trump during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign. But the incoming president’s protections for waters hugging Florida’s west coast and the southeast US were set to expire in 2032, whereas Biden is making them permanent.
Trump on Monday vowed to reverse Biden’s actions as soon as he takes office.
“I’ll un-ban it immediately,” Trump said in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show. “I have the right to un-ban it immediately. What’s he doing? Why is he doing it?”
Oil industry leaders panned the move, saying widespread restrictions — even on territory that’s of little interest for drilling now — undermine domestic energy potential.
Such blanket bans “threaten our economic and national security by creating political barriers to our own resources,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association. “Even if there’s no immediate interest in some areas, it’s crucial for the federal government to maintain the flexibility to adapt its energy policy, especially in response to unexpected global changes like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
The US government is currently on track to hold just three auctions of drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years, under an anemic plan developed by the Biden administration. Congressional Republicans have been considering mandating more sales as a way to raise revenue that can offset the cost of extending tax cuts.
