An offshore oil rig
Washington: President Joe Biden is set to order a ban on new offshore oil and gas development across some 625 million acres of US coastal territory, ruling out the sale of drilling rights in Atlantic and Pacific waters as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
The move is a sweeping effort to permanently protect coastal waters – and communities that depend on them – from fossil fuel development and the risk of oil spills.
At the same time, Biden is keeping the door open for new oil and natural gas leasing in the central and western portions of the Gulf of Mexico that provide about 14% of US output, said people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the decision is not yet public.
Biden’s decision, set to be announced on Dec 6, will further burnish his climate credentials, deepening his record fostering conservation and zero-emission energy.
It builds on a series of last-minute White House moves to safeguard lands and enshrine environmental protections before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
White House spokespeople didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Unlike other steps Biden has taken to constrain fossil fuel development and the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, this one could have long-lived durability, complicating Trump’s intentions to bolster domestic oil and gas production.
That’s because Biden’s planned proclamation is rooted in a 72-year-old provision of federal law that gives presidents broad discretion to withdraw US waters from oil leasing without explicitly authorising revocations.
Presidents of both parties – including Trump – have invoked the same statute to protect coral reefs, walrus feeding grounds and other American waters from Florida to Alaska.
And while presidents have modified decisions by predecessors to exempt areas from oil leasing, courts have never validated a complete reversal.
Congressional Democrats and environmental groups had lobbied Biden to maximise permanent protections against offshore drilling to safeguard vulnerable coastal communities, protect marine ecosystems from oil spills and fight climate change.
Some environmental activists were divided on the best approach, worried that a too-broad declaration could jeopardise a legal tool that’s been used to conserve special marine areas since 1953.
Yet the planned proclamation is simultaneously muscular and strategic – indefinitely protecting some areas that Republican and Democratic politicians have jointly pushed to keep free from drilling without encroaching on long-active territory in the Gulf of Mexico that’s a foundation of US oil and gas production.
The declaration would not affect drilling and other activity on existing leases.
It also keeps a path open for Republican lawmakers to order more central and western Gulf oil lease sales as a way to raise revenue that could offset the cost of extending tax cuts. — Bloomberg
