Offshore Oil & Gas

 

13 States Urge Court To Halt Biden's Oil Leasing Freeze. According to E&E News, “A coalition of 13 Republican state attorneys general are pressing a federal court to swiftly block the Biden administration’s moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters. Led by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the states asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to immediately bar agencies from enacting the president’s January executive order calling for review of the environmental impacts of the federal leasing program. The states’ request for a preliminary injunction yesterday stems from a lawsuit filed by the coalition last month (Energywire, March 25). Biden’s ‘ban does not cite the statutory frameworks requiring oil and gas leasing, explain how the moratorium comports with those statutes and accompanying regulations, or give any reason for the moratorium,’ the attorneys general wrote in a court filing supporting their request. ‘Nor does it explain why the Federal Government so drastically changed course without allowing interested parties to express their views,’ they continued. ‘Each of those failings is fatal to the ban.’ The states argued that the president had not considered Congress’ requirements under the Mineral Leasing Act or the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that the federal government offer federal lands and waters for development.” [E&E News, 4/1/21 (=)]

 

States Ask Court To Block Biden Order Pausing Leasing. According to Politico, “A coalition of red states challenging Biden’s executive order pausing new oil and gas leasing on public lands on Wednesday asked a district court in Louisiana to issue a preliminary injunction against it, effectively restarting leasing. ‘Because this so-called ‘pause’ alters potential lessees’ right to participate in sales—and Plaintiff States’ entitlement to proceeds from lease sales under [the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act] and the Five-Year Program—it is a substantive rule that cannot be imposed by fiat, but must be promulgated following the APA’s notice-and-comment procedures,’ the states wrote. Industry groups are suing separately in Wyoming but have not yet asked that court to block Biden’s order.” [Politico, 4/1/21 (=)]

 

Marine Renewable Energy

 

Two Marine Firms Hired For Vineyard Wind. According to E&E News, “Vineyard Wind yesterday announced a new step in its plans to build America’s first major offshore wind development, selecting two marine companies to aid in construction of the 62-turbine project. DEME Group, a Belgian base marine services firm, will provide a ‘jack up’ vessel to install the turbines. Seattle-based FOSS Maritime Co. will operate the service vessels that will ferry materials and workers to the installation site, some 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. ‘We’re very excited to make this announcement today not only because it’s an important step in the development of our first project but also because of the impact it will have on the US workforce,’ said Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pedersen in a statement. ‘By working with companies like DEME Offshore US LLC and FOSS Maritime, we can ensure that US labor is gaining from the experience of well-established operators, so that the industry can take proper root and grow a fully American workforce.’ The announcement comes on the heels of the release of an environmental impact statement by federal regulators and amid a push from the Biden administration to boost the industry. It also hints at the larger logistical challenges facing offshore wind developers in America. The Jones Act prohibits foreign-flagged ships from carrying goods between U.S. ports. But there are currently no U.S.-flagged jack up vessels in operation. Dominion Energy Inc., the Virginia-based utility, has commissioned one, but it is not expected to enter operation until 2023, the year Vineyard Wind is scheduled to come online.” [E&E News, 4/1/21 (=)]

 

Northeast States Face Political Minefield On Offshore Wind. According to Politico, “Northeastern governors are seeing green when it comes to offshore wind energy. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo boasts of making the Empire State a ‘global wind energy manufacturing powerhouse.’ His New Jersey counterpart, fellow Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, dreams of making his state the ‘national capital’ for offshore wind. And Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, is banking on an offshore wind boom capable of powering his state’s net-zero climate ambitions. The only problem: All three governors need help from Washington to realize their goals. Offshore wind has the potential to slash greenhouse gas emissions, create union jobs and breathe billions of dollars into rusting ports along the Atlantic. But the industry and the governors backing it face a series of formidable obstacles ranging from opposition from the fishing community and beach dwellers to logistical challenges like building out port infrastructure and connecting to the Northeast’s collection of aging grids. Offshore wind isn’t just a jobs boon for Northeastern states. It’s the clincher for ambitious policies aimed at tackling climate change and expanding the economy, a solution to the problem of building renewables in a densely populated region where power demand is high but open land is scarce. Success means the Northeast goes from energy buyer to energy supplier.” [Politico, 3/31/21 (=)]

 

Chart Of The Day: The U.S. Is Way Behind In Offshore Wind. According to Axios, “Let’s follow up briefly on White House plans unveiled earlier this week to spur the development of 30 gigawatts of offshore U.S. wind generating capacity by 2030. The big picture: While several big commercial-scale projects along the Atlantic Coast were already in the works before the announcement, right now the U.S. lags way behind Europe and China in offshore wind.” [Axios, 3/31/21 (=)]

 

Editorial: California Needs Offshore Wind Farms Too. According to Los Angeles Times, “The Biden administration this week announced plans to speed up development of offshore wind farms to create 30 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030 — enough to power more than 10 million homes — while investing $230 million in related port improvements and making $3 billion in loans available to the offshore wind-power industry. It’s an ambitious plan which the administration framed partly as a means to create 44,000 renewable energy jobs. Yet the more important impact would be to help speed up our conversion from fossil fuels to renewables. To that end, good. But do more, faster. It is inarguable that our generations-long reliance on burning fossil fuels for energy has pushed global temperatures up, with increasingly dangerous climate changes — more powerful storms, deeper droughts, stranger and more severe weather patterns steered by shifting jet streams and higher sea levels caused by melting glaciers. The longer it takes the world to shift away from burning fossil fuels, the worse the changes in climate and the ensuing impacts, including species extinctions, disrupted food chains and political instability of governments struggling to deal with economies that are evolving and populations that are migrating to more hospitable environs.” [Los Angeles Times, 3/31/21 (+)]

 

Op-Ed: Biden's Offshore Wind Energy Plan Is What The Climate — And Economy — Needs. According to an op-ed by Hayes Brown in MSNBC, “For a slightly larger sample size, we turn to the Pew Research Center, which last year found that 83 percent of Americans are in favor of building more wind turbine farms. The survey also determined that 75 percent of Republicans are in favor of expanding wind power use, which came as a surprise to me. That statistic tracks with a study published in Energy Policy in 2018, which found, among other things, that ‘Democrats and Republican opponents overestimate Republican opposition’ to proposed offshore wind energy projects. But can you blame me/us for thinking so? In the almost two years since progressive Democrats introduced the Green New Deal, Republicans have taken horrible glee in beating the set of proposals with a rhetorical stick, even as they do nothing to address climate change. See, for example, the lies told during Texas’ historic winter storm this year, which shut off power to residents throughout the state. Gov. Greg Abbott at one point claimed that the outages showed ‘how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. ... It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas, as well as other states.’ Fox News pundit and professional troll Tucker Carlson agreed: ‘Unbeknownst to most people, the Green New Deal came to Texas; the power grid in the state became totally reliant on windmills.’ (The truth is that while Texas does produce the most wind energy in the country, like I said earlier, it’s still only about 10 percent of the power generated in winter; the outages were due more to natural gas freezing in pipes.)” [MSNBC, 3/31/21 (+)]

 

Fisheries & Marine Life

 

Court Finds Alaska Oil Project Would Harm Beluga Whales. According to E&E News, “An energy company’s plan for oil exploration in Alaska’s Cook Inlet suffered a setback this week after a judge found that the federal government had not fully studied how the project could disturb endangered beluga whales. The U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska ruled on Tuesday that the federal government had failed to account for the potential harm from the noise from tugboats Hilcorp Alaska LLC would use to pull mobile drill rigs around the inlet. The Cook Inletkeeper and the Center for Biological Diversity had challenged NOAA Fisheries’ ‘incidental take’ authorizations for Hilcorp to conduct oil and gas exploration and production activities in the Cook Inlet from 2019 to 2024 (E&E News PM, Sept. 4, 2019). While NOAA Fisheries had done enough to mitigate and monitor seismic surveying under federal law, the agency’s determination that the tugboats wouldn’t lead to incidental take or harm to Cook Inlet beluga whales was arbitrary and capricious, said Judge Sharon Gleason. She shot down the federal government’s argument that any disruption from tugboat traffic would be ‘brief and infrequent’ and would allow the whales to return to the area after the vessels had passed. Gleason, an Obama appointee, said the government’s position ‘fundamentally misreads’ the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). ‘An exposure to noise that results in, for example, a beluga whale leaving an area in which it is foraging for food constitutes a disruption of its feeding pattern and is thus a take by the plain language of the MMPA, even if the beluga returns shortly afterward,’ the judge wrote in her order.” [E&E News, 4/1/21 (=)]

 

NOAA Postpones New Rules To Protect Turtles From Shrimp Nets. According to E&E News, “New rules designed to keep endangered and threatened sea turtles from drowning in some inshore shrimp nets are being postponed, and federal regulators are considering whether to expand the rules, officials said yesterday. Coronavirus pandemic restrictions over the past year have limited in-person workshops and training opportunities for fishermen to install escape hatches called turtle excluder devices, or TEDs, NOAA said. Therefore, the new rules announced in 2019 will take effect Aug. 1 instead of tomorrow. ‘The delay ... is to allow NOAA Fisheries additional time for training fishermen, ensuring TEDs are built and installed properly, and for responding to installation and maintenance problems when the regulations go in effect,’ the statement said. Six species of sea turtles, all of them endangered or threatened, are found in U.S. waters. The rule requires the devices on skimmer trawls pulled by boats at least 40 feet long. NOAA Fisheries is reconsidering whether to require the devices on boats shorter than 40 feet long, ‘and whether additional rulemaking is currently warranted,’ the statement said. In 2019, NOAA said the changes from rules proposed in 2016 would cut the likely number of turtles saved from more than 2,400 to as many as 1,160 a year.” [E&E News, 3/31/21 (=)]

 

Judge Throws Roadblock Into Hilcorp Oil Exploration In Cook Inlet, Citing Potential Impacts To Beluga Whales. According to Anchorage Daily News, “A federal judge on Tuesday sided with conservation groups and rejected a federal rule that allows Hilcorp to carry out oil and gas activity in Cook Inlet that could disrupt or potentially harm the Inlet’s endangered beluga whale population. The oil company in 2018 applied for incidental take authorization from the National Marine Fisheries Service, so it could carry out exploratory drilling and related work between 2019 and 2024 that could potentially disrupt the beluga whales and other marine mammals with its loud noise. The agency issued the approval in 2019, prompting a lawsuit from Homer-based Cook Inletkeeper and the Center for Biological Diversity, a national group. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason on Tuesday determined that the agency had not properly considered the impact from tug boat noise associated with the activities, though the Fisheries Service’s recovery plan for the whales had identified noise from tugs as a major threat to the animals, according to the 52-page ruling. The court ‘finds that the agency determination that noise from Hilcorp’s tugs towing the drill rig would not cause any take by harassment of Cook Inlet beluga whales is arbitrary and capricious for the reasons set forth herein, and the agency relied on this erroneous determination in its issuance of the Incidental Take Regulations’ and other reviews, Gleason wrote.” [Anchorage Daily News, 3/30/21 (=)]

 

Ocean Health & Management

 

Lawmakers Call On Biden To Put $10 Billion Toward Coastal Restoration. According to The Hill, “Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) and Bill Posey (R-Fla.) called on President Biden to commit $10 billion to coastal restoration and resilience efforts Wednesday. In a letter addressed to Biden, the representatives note that under the Obama administration, $167 million in stimulus funding was appropriated for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Habitat conservation for coastal restoration. The letter goes on to state that such projects can serve as major economic stimulus for coastal areas, noting that projects funded by the appropriation restored over 25,584 acres of coastal habitat. The lawmakers added that restoration projects also supported an average of 15 jobs per million dollars spent, and the projects supported as many as 30 jobs per million spent on major, labor-intensive restorations, such as oyster-reef construction. The letter further states that restoration of blue carbon ecosystems in coastal areas could keep up to a gigaton of carbon dioxide out of the earth’s atmosphere by 2050. ‘These funds should be used for projects like blue carbon sequestration that improve adaptation to climate change; natural infrastructure to protect coastal communities from sea level rise, coastal storms, and flooding; the restoration of habitat to protect or recover threatened or endangered species, including fisheries; and efforts to remove marine debris,’ the letter states.” [The Hill, 3/31/21 (=)]

 

Coastal Resilience Goal Of New State Program. According to Public News Service, “Twenty-five coastal communities will have money from the state to better prepare for natural hazards. The funding is geared to drive better-informed decision making at the local level and initiatives that reduce risk and vulnerability to flooding, storms and other effects of climate change. The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management announced March 17 a total of $675,000 would be granted through the new Resilient Coastal Communities Program, launched in the fall to provide technical and financial help to governments in the state’s 20 coastal counties to develop resilience efforts. The application deadline was Jan. 15. ‘We wish we had the funding to have accepted all interested communities into the program, but we hope to secure additional funding to offer another round of Phase 1 and 2 funding in the future,’ Sam Burdick, coastal resilience coordinator with the Division of Coastal Management, recently told Coastal Review. The division received 30 applications representing 32 coastal communities - one application was submitted by three communities - for the first two phases of grant funding. ‘Building resilience to natural hazards is vital for communities to help maintain quality of life, healthy growth, durable systems, and conservation of resources for present and future generations,’ Burdick explained. ‘However, a number of barriers to developing resilience to coastal risks exist, including economic and capacity constraints that have been exacerbated in recent times. Building more resilient communities requires careful, thorough planning efforts using sound, locally relevant data.’” [Public News Service, 4/1/21 (=)]

 

Louisiana Will Get $110 Million For Coastal Restoration, Hurricane Protection. According to Lafayette Daily Advisor, “Louisiana and its parishes will receive more than $109.9 million for coastal restoration and hurricane protection projects through the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA), the U.S. Department of Interior announced, though the funding dropped nearly 29.4% from the previous year. For the fiscal year 2020, the federal government distributed around $249 million to the nation’s Gulf of Mexico offshore oil-producing states — Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. The federal government gives the states and their subdivisions a set percentage of oil and gas revenue produced in the Gulf. ‘Revenues from offshore oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico are the only consistent funding source for critical restoration and hurricane protection projects that help make our communities safer and stronger,’ said Tyler Gray, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, in a news release. ‘The future of our coast depends on continued domestic energy production in the Gulf of Mexico, and we need collaborative solutions that address climate change while also promoting a robust federal leasing program.’” [Lafayette Daily Advisor, 3/31/21 (=)]

 

AP | State Eyes Work To Protect Coastline, Cut Carbon Emissions. According to E&E News, “New Jersey will study its coastal marshes, estuaries and back bays to develop a list of projects to help protect shore communities, restore damaged ecosystems and prevent the release of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere. The state Department of Environmental Protection is providing $150,000 for the effort, called the Coastal Ecological Restoration and Adaptation Plan, that also will include teams from Rutgers University. The goal is to develop a list of projects the state can fund and execute in the coming years to protect communities from storms and rising seas, and also to reduce the state’s contribution to climate change. ‘New Jersey stands to endure, unfortunately, a great deal of harm from climate change,’ said Shawn LaTourette, DEP’s acting commissioner. ‘We need to be ready for that. But the work of planning is hard, and long-lasting. This plan is at the beginning of that effort.’ Starting in mid-April, teams will fan out across the state’s 127-mile shoreline looking for projects that can accomplish more than one beneficial goal at once. For instance, restoring coastal marshes could help protect an area from storm damage or flooding, while at the same time preventing those marshes from releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide that they have stored into the atmosphere if the marshes degrade or die.” [E&E News, 4/1/21 (=)]

 

 

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