Update: Biden to ban new oil drilling over vast areas of US Atlantic, Pacific waters
This story is an update to Report: Biden to ban more offshore oil drilling before Trump arrives | Offshore.
President Joe Biden is set to ban new offshore oil and gas development across 625 million acres (250 million hectares) of US offshore areas, as reported by several online sources, including Bloomberg News, Reuters, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Biden is expected to two memorandums on Monday that prohibit future federal oil and gas leasing across large swaths of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, according to the reports, which cited “unidentified people familiar with the matter.”
The Northern Bering Sea, off the coast of western Alaska, is home to migrating marine mammals including bowhead and beluga whales, walruses and ice seals, which are hunted by many Alaska natives. In 2016, President Barack Obama issued an executive order that prohibited oil and gas exploration across more than 112,000 square miles of marine habitat in the Northern Bering Sea and called for tribal co-management of the protected area.
Biden is leaving the possibility open for new oil and natural gas leasing in the central and western areas of the Gulf of Mexico, which account for around 14% of the nation’s production of these fuels, the report said.
The New York Times reported that a section of the law that Biden’s decision relies on – the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act – gives a president wide leeway to bar drilling and does not include language that would allow President-elect Donald Trump or other future presidents to revoke the ban.
Biden, Trump and Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, all used the law to ban sales of offshore drilling rights in some offshore areas.
Trump tried in 2017 to reverse Arctic and Atlantic Ocean withdrawals Obama had made at the end of his presidency, but a federal judge ruled in 2019 that the law does not give presidents the legal authority to overturn prior bans.
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), the new chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has reportedly said that he will seek to overturn the decision using the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to nullify an executive action within 60 days of enactment with a simple majority vote.
