Biden Bans Offshore Oil Drilling in Large Parts of Ocean: NPR

Three oil rigs are seen in federal waters off the coast of Southern California in 2021. President Biden has banned new oil and gas leases in more than 625 million acres of federal waters; existing leases are not affected.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

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Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

President Biden is using a decades-old law to block drilling for oil in more than 625 million acres of U.S. oceans — the largest region a president has ever protected using that authority. It’s a move designed to help cement his climate legacy, and one the incoming Trump administration is expected to challenge.

Biden has previously protected much smaller regions from oil development, but Monday’s announcement covers far more territory: the entire East Coast and West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and part of the Bering Sea.

Oil and gas companies that want to find or produce offshore oil must pay the US government to lease parts of the ocean. Biden’s action prohibits new leases in the identified regions; it does not affect existing tenancies.

Most of the newly protected area is not particularly attractive to the oil industry, at least not yet. This has led some to dismiss this move as merely symbolic. But the region includes the eastern Gulf of Mexico, where oil companies are interested in expanding once an existing moratorium expires. And all together, the vast swaths of ocean set aside in this move — hypothetically forever — comprise more than a third of the U.S. offshore oil and gas likely to be economically extractable, according to government data and analysts at Clearview Energy Partners.

The oil industry has objected to the moratorium. “American voters sent a clear message in support of domestic energy development, and yet the current administration is using its final days in office to cement a record of doing everything possible to curtail it,” said the American Petroleum Institute’s president, Mike Sommers, in a statement. The API suggested that reversing this “politically motivated” action should be a top priority for Congress.

“While there is no immediate interest in some areas, it is critical for the federal government to maintain the flexibility to adjust its energy policy, especially in response to unexpected global changes such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Erik Milito, president of a trade. group representing offshore energy development said in a statement. “Blanket bans only serve to transfer energy production and economic opportunities overseas.”

Green groups, meanwhile, celebrated the announcement. “We see this as an epic ocean victory,” said Joseph Gordon, campaign director for Oceana, a nonprofit organization that advocates for ocean conservation worldwide. “This is a commitment to turn the corner from fossil fuels to clean energy. And we hope that millions of Americans who live near the ocean or visit or see places on the map that are protected today … can take comfort in knowing that these places will never be subject to offshore drilling and they will never (experience) an oil spill like the Deepwater Horizon,” the devastating 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is of course a familiar divide, with industry representatives on one side and environmental groups on the other. For his part, Biden rejected that framing. “We don’t have to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy,” he said in a statement calling it a false choice. “Protecting America’s coasts and oceans is the right thing to do.”

Bipartisan history, uncertain future

Previous presidents have used the same authority that Biden wielded today to protect ocean areas from drilling, though never so many acres at once. Trump himself used it to protect the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina for 12 years.

But it is significant that Biden’s move has no expiration date. And courts have previously found that makes the move essentially permanent.

After former President Barack Obama took a similar action late in his administration to protect waters from drilling without an end date, Trump tried to reverse it — to no avail. Courts found that the Outer Continental Shelf Act allows a president to protect waters indefinitely and contains no provision for removal that protection.

Kevin Book of Clearview Energy Partners says this doesn’t mean the Trump administration can’t undo those protections. “The administration, having done this once before, is likely to look to a congressional roadblock as a means of resolution,” he says.

A filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill could be a path to reopening those acres to oil development. That would be attractive not just as a way to follow through on Trump’s campaign promises to “drill, baby, drill,” but also for the fiscal benefits: Offshore oil lease auctions make money for the federal government.

Book says that with Republicans in Congress promising a reconciliation bill this summer, those protections — or some of them — could be rolled back as early as this year.