James Pintar
The Biden administration on Friday unveiled a plan to phase down oil and gas auctions in federal waters, with a maximum of just three sales in the Gulf of Mexico through the end of the decade and no planned federal rounds in Atlantic, Pacific and Alaskan waters.
The Interior Department’s long-awaited five-year plan, which was met with derision from both the fossil fuel industry and environmental groups, calls for no oil and gas lease sales in 2024, and just one new sale per year to be held in 2025, 2027 and 2029 – by far the fewest in any five-year plan since the government began publishing data in 1980.
The department said it approved the minimum number of oil lease sales required to expand its offshore wind program, which is now tethered to fossil fuel leasing as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law passed by the Congress last year.
The Biden administration has been an advocate for clean energy, but high inflation and gasoline prices have pressured it to roll back earlier promises to stop drilling on federal lands and offshore.
The government is still on track to auction oil leases across 73M acres in the Gulf of Mexico by November 8.
The Gulf of Mexico produces ~15% of all U.S. crude oil, reaching 1.85M bbl/day in June, up from a year earlier but still below the region’s pre-COVID peak.
It takes 4-10 years between issuing a lease to first oil production, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
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