Biden Offshore Drilling Ban Marks Climate Win, Which Trump Vows to Undo

With just two weeks left in his term, United States President Joe Biden has signed a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in federal waters—a move that will require an act of Congress to reverse.

Supporters hailed the ban as a capstone on Biden’s environmental legacy. Biden has “conserved more lands and waters than any other U.S. president in history,” the White House said in a news release. Critics, however, slammed the “11th-hour” action as detrimental to consumers.

But the areas barred from leasing were not of immediate interest to the oil industry and do not include active developments, Mark James, an associate professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told The Energy Mix.

“Yes, it does remove a very large block of the outer continental shelf from offshore oil and gas leasing, but it does not bring significant changes to the current operations and interests of the oil and gas industry,” he said. “However, because the withdrawals are in perpetuity, it does prevent future leasing of these areas.”

The decision, aimed at protecting the country’s coastlines for future generations, reflects a broader consideration of “the many uses and benefits of America’s ocean,” Biden said in a news release. “It is clear to me that the relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health, and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling.”

Biden used authority granted by the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which gives him the power to remove unleased lands of the outer continental shelf from leasing opportunities. The Act does not lay out a process for presidents to reverse the action, which stands to complicate matters for incoming president Donald Trump, who has already said in an interview that he would “un-ban it immediately.”

Trump could issue an order. But an attempt during his first presidency to roll back a similar ban implemented by former president Barack Obama through OCSLA was blocked by a federal court. The court in that case ruled that doing so would require an act of Congress.

That makes reversing the ban tricky, but not unattainable, especially since all three branches of government will be controlled by Republicans. Congressional Republicans could reverse the order by including a provision to reinstate offshore areas in a filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill, Kevin Book of research firm ClearView Energy told Axios.

But James questioned the motivation for doing so. “What impact would there be?” he asked. “Not much, in the present.”

The order bans oil and gas leases on 625 million acres (around 2.5 million square kilometres) of federal waters, but it will not affect large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, where the vast majority of U.S. offshore oil and gas is produced. Plus, many of the designated areas are already protected in some other way.

There are currently no active oil and gas leases in federal waters off the eastern Atlantic coast, and Trump himself signed a 10-year ban on drilling off the Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia coasts during his first term. State governments on the west coast—like California—have already shown stiff resistance to offshore drilling, and the protected areas in the Bering Sea expand a previous ban by Obama.

The White House said affected areas in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico were already off limits since the 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, though those restrictions would have lapsed in 2032 without Biden’s order. Axios singled out this region as a point of particular friction that has drawn interest from oil and gas companies. But Florida has long opposed drilling there, and it was Trump [pdf] who extended the original moratorium period that expired in 2020, James said.

Both of Trump’s orders banning offshore drilling were made under the same OCSLA section as Biden’s, though Trump set an end date while Biden’s are indefinite.

Despite this history, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s order a “disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices.”

“Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

The U.S. government will still be required to offer 60 million acres (24.2 million hectares) of offshore oil and gas leases in any one-year period as a prerequisite for offering offshore wind leases under the terms of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Biden has also approved a five-year drilling plan that includes proposed offshore sales in 2025, 2027 and 2029—located in the areas of the Gulf not included in his order—that would satisfy that requirement, reports The Associated Press.

The ban won’t affect those terms, but James says the bigger issue is whether the incoming Trump administration will continue to hold wind energy auctions. Some wind power companies with leases are scaling back their plans while they wait to see how the industry fares in the new political and economic environment.

“I fully expect that the Trump administration and future administrations [Democrat or Republican] will continue to issue oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico,” said James. “While the number of leases issued may vary, the practice will continue regardless of who sits in the White House.”