The Department of the Interior confirmed to the Washington Post that the three remaining offshore oil and gas lease sales for millions of acres off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico this year have been canceled. A spokesperson told the paper that the one lease sale off the coast of Alaska was canceled due to lack of interest and that the two remaining Gulf of Mexico lease sales would not move forward “due to factors including conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.” The news comes as a deadline looms closer for the Biden administration to release and adopt a new five-year offshore drilling plan.
The current program expires on June 30th and there is simply not enough time for the Interior Department to release a plan—which it hasn’t—and account for multiple comment periods as well as time for the president and Congress to review the program. Pending a new leasing plan, all offshore lease sales are off the table. President Biden was staunchly opposed to continuing offshore drilling during his campaign and even signed an executive order shortly after taking office pausing oil and gas lease sales offshore and on public lands. A legal back-and-forth between the administration and Republican attorneys general representing states with vested interests in fossil fuels further complicated things. The case is still active and most recently a briefing schedule was adopted in March. The case itself has no bearing on whether or not the Interior Department brings forth an oil and gas leasing plan, so this may be a savvy way to get around battling Republicans in a never-ending legal saga in the interim.
Republicans, of course, have been plenty vocal about the cancellation of the remaining three lease sales of the year. Newsweek found current conservative lawmakers and former Trump advisors taking to Twitter to slam the decision, decrying high gas prices but unsurprisingly ignoring the fact that it can take up to a decade for offshore wells to even start producing oil. Not to mention the fact that such a lag time only means the U.S. would be further solidifying its dependence on fossil fuels and going against Biden’s own net-zero goals.
Environmental groups like the Sierra Club were thrilled by the development and expressed the same hope that I have about the Biden administration potentially eliminating such leases altogether. “At a time when we need to be rapidly transitioning away from dirty oil and gas to meet our climate commitments and avert the worst of the climate crisis, the last thing we need is to sell off even more of our waters to the fossil fuel industry,” Sierra Club Lands Protection Director Athan Manuel said in a statement. “We applaud the Biden administration for taking this critical action to protect communities and climate this year, and now we urge them to finish the job by committing to no new offshore drilling leases, period.”