Biden bans new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of US coastline

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President Joe Biden announced a ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the US coastline on Monday in a move designed to bolster his environmental and climate legacy as he prepares to leave office.

The order will protect 625mn acres of ocean on the US east coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, as well as portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, the White House said on Monday.

“My decision reflects what the coastal communities, business and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said.

The executive action will not prevent oil and gas companies obtaining leases in the central and western parts of the Gulf of Mexico, areas that produce almost 15 per cent of the nation’s oil supplies. Nevertheless, the move is expected to complicate the policy agenda of incoming president Donald Trump, who has vowed to “drill, baby, drill” and boost US oil production, even though it is already at a record level.

The Trump transition team said it was a disgraceful decision designed to exact “political revenge on the American people”.

Biden’s action will probably be challenged by the oil industry in court and face pushback from Republicans in Congress. But overturning the order could prove challenging and may require an act of Congress, according to legal experts.

Biden is using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to protect the areas from drilling — the same mechanism which former president Barack Obama used previously to ban offshore drilling in some Arctic and Atlantic waters in 2016.

In 2019, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by former president Donald Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawful.

Despite his criticism of Biden’s action, during the election campaign in 2020 Trump used the same executive authority to extend a moratorium on offshore drilling off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, which has campaigned to ban offshore drilling along the US Atlantic coast for more than a decade, welcomed Biden’s action, saying it built on the legacy of presidents Obama and Trump, who had acted to protect southern coasts from drilling.

“Critically, it is very hard to repeal this type of action, which is rooted in the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Federal courts have said previously that these protections cannot be revoked by presidential action, and that it takes Congress changing the law to undo this,” said Nat Mund, director of federal affairs at the SELC.

ClearView Energy Partners, a consultancy, said the ban in the eastern Gulf of Mexico would affect about 40 per cent of undiscovered economically recoverable oil and gas resources in the US outer continental shelf.

“Per recent jurisprudence, withdrawals without time limits appear to be irreversible under existing Executive Branch authorities. However, GOP lawmakers may try to use a filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill later this year to reinstate some or all acreage withdrawn today,” Clearview said.