President Biden is using a decades-old law to block drilling for oil in more than 625 million acres of U.S. ocean — the largest region a president has ever protected using this 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 vastly more territory: the entire East Coast and West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and a portion of the Bering Sea.
Oil and gas companies that want to find or produce offshore oil have to pay the U.S. government to lease sections of the ocean. Biden's action prohibits new leases in the identified regions; it does not affect any existing leases.
Most of the newly-protected territory is not particularly appealing to the oil industry, at least right now. That's 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 when an existing moratorium expires. And all together, the huge swathes of ocean set aside in this move — hypothetically forever — include more than a third of the offshore U.S. oil and gas that is likely economical to extract, 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 restrict it," American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers said in a statement. The API suggested that reversing this "politically-motivated" action should be a top priority for Congress.
"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," Erik Milito, the president of a trade group representing offshore energy development, said in a statement. "Blanket bans only serve to transfer energy production and economic opportunities abroad."
Green groups, meanwhile, celebrated the announcement. "We see this as an epic ocean victory," says Joseph Gordon, campaign director for Oceana, a nonprofit that advocates for ocean conservation worldwide. "This is a commitment to turning 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 protected today … can take comfort knowing that those places will never be subject to offshore drilling and they'll never [experience] an oil spill like 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 do not need 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 ocean is the right thing to do."
Bipartisan history, uncertain future
Previous presidents have used the same authority Biden exerted today to protect ocean regions from drilling, though never so many acres at one time. Trump himself used it to protect the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina for 12 years.
But, significantly, Biden's move has no expiration date. And courts have previously found that makes the move essentially permanent.
After former President Barack Obama undertook a similar action late in his administration to protect waters from drilling with no end date, Trump attempted to reverse it — without success. Courts found that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act allows a president to protect waters indefinitely, and doesn't include any provision for removing that protection.
Kevin Book of Clearview Energy Partners says this doesn't mean the Trump administration can't undo these protections. "The administration, having done this once before, will probably look to a congressional pathway as a means of resolution," he says.
A filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill could be a path for reopening these 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 budgetary benefits: offshore oil lease auctions make money for the federal government.
Book says with Republicans in Congress promising a reconciliation bill this summer, these protections — or some of them — might be rolled back as early as this year.
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