Environmental groups applauded President Joe Biden’s decision decision on Monday (January 6) to impose a whole ban on recent offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the US coast. But the ban contained one glaring omission: It didn’t cover the western Gulf of Mexico, where the country produces most of its oil offshore.
Aimed at protecting the environment and mitigating damage from climate change, the ban prohibits future oil and gas leasing in federal waters off the East and West Coasts, parts of the Bering Sea off Alaska and the eastern Gulf. The exact limits haven’t been announced, but generally speaking, federal regulators define eastern gulf as the waters extending from the southern tip of Florida to the Alabama line. This would go away the waters off the coast of Louisiana and Texas open to drilling.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses and beachgoers have long known: that drilling on these shores could cause irreparable harm to places we hold dear and are not necessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in an announcement statement. “It’s not worth the risk.”
Biden and other presidents have protected much smaller areas from oil and gas development, often with expiration dates. Monday’s actions seem like in the nature of a everlasting ban, although President-elect Donald Trump has already indicated his intention to achieve this “unban immediately” after taking office later this month.
“It’s an epic victory over the ocean!” said Joseph Gordon, campaign director of Oceana, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans.
But some environmentalists weren’t so thrilled.
“That’s great, but is the central and western Gulf of Mexico just a sacrifice zone then?” asked Don Boesch, a marine scientist who served on the ship National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spillwho investigated the 2010 crash. “That’s where it all is [Outer Continental Shelf] drilling takes place and greenhouse gas emissions are created.”
The bay constitutes 97% of all oil and natural gas production in coastal waters of the United States. The overwhelming majority of that production takes place near Louisiana and Texas, not on the Florida coast, which could be protected by Biden.
The oil and gas industry has criticized the ban as misguided and potentially damaging to the economy.
“While this does not directly impact the western Gulf of Mexico, [the ban] “This is an egregious attack on the oil and gas industry – an industry critical to our nation’s energy security and economic strength,” said Tommy Faucheux, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group.
But Boesch noted that few oil firms are pushing for drilling on the oil-scarce East and West Coasts or on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
“The ban will have no impact on oil leasing in the central and western Gulf, where substantially all drilling is taking place or is likely to take place over the next 4 years,” Boesch he wrote on X
It is unclear whether or how quickly Trump, a robust supporter of the oil and gas industry, will follow through on his promise to reverse the ban. However, some experts say repealing the resolution could possibly be time-consuming, complicated and may require motion by Congress. Courts could also make a difference. In 2019, a federal judge ruled that presidents can block drilling but cannot repeal previous bans.
Trump hasn’t all the time opposed restrictions on offshore drilling. During his 2020 re-election campaign, Trump prolonged a moratorium on drilling off Florida’s Gulf Coast and expanded it to cover the state’s Atlantic coast and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
“It protects your beautiful bay and your beautiful ocean and will continue to do so for a long time” – Trump he said in 2020.
On Monday, Biden recalled Oil spill on the Deepwater Horizon platform announcing the recent ban, he said the disaster was a “solemn reminder of the costs and risks of offshore drilling.”
The spill killed 11 employees and spilled 4 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf off the coast of Louisiana over 87 days. Biden said the disaster “underscores the importance of the legal protections I am introducing today.”
But the ban does little to guard the Gulf from future spills, said Martha Collins, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Healthy Gulf.
“We are disappointed that President Biden did not take the opportunity to withdraw additional areas in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly the risky deepwater regions and western Gulf,” she said. “These areas remain vulnerable to catastrophic oil spills.”
Nearly 15 years later, marine animals are still affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Last month a test led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that the density of some whale species in the Persian Gulf had dropped by 83% since the disaster. Many of the whales present in the Gulf are like this threatened or endangered.
“I am frustrated that many places have been left out [of the ban] “are where offshore drilling does the most harm to Gulf communities and endangered species,” said Brady Bradshaw, ocean campaign manager for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group focused on wildlife conservation. “This was a missed opportunity to protect the western and central Gulf.”
