President Joe 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 and West coasts, 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. However, 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.