Interior Department, Amid Its Deep Concern About Offshore Wind Power, Announces 30 New Offshore Oil Auctions

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re putting in place a bold, long-term program that strengthens American Energy Dominance, creates good-paying jobs and ensures we continue to responsibly develop our offshore resources,” Burgum gushed on Tuesday. The first lease sale — titled, no joke, “Big Beautiful Gulf 1” — will be held December 10 for parts of the Gulf, followed by a March-August schedule for both areas, including some perhaps ambitious planning for continued sales in the 2033 through 2039 range.

Only weeks after supposedly “leveling the playing field” for all energy sources, the oil industry can now plan decades of feasting while the wind industry languishes in the corner, or simply ignores this backwater of a country and keeps building at breakneck pace in Europe, China, and elsewhere. Burgum and the DOI aren’t bothering to pretend at this point. Just a few days ago, Politico’s E&E News reported that the abrupt halt to the Empire Wind project in New York waters back in April, which Burgum said was based on a NOAA report finding “flawed science” behind the project’s permitting, was shady as hell: a version of that report, obtained via a FOIA request, was almost entirely redacted. A full 27 pages were blacked out, and Burgum isn’t explaining exactly what those “flaws” were.

Empire Wind was allowed to restart just a month later, clearly not enough time for any shaky scientific work to be repeated or ironed out — because the governor of New York and the administration appeared to agree on allowing more oil and gas development to move forward. The only good wind farm, for this administration, is one covered in oil.

The new lease sales announced this week don’t necessarily translate to enormously expanded offshore drilling, though it’s certainly a start. The companies that do the drilling will determine whether the economics of expanded offshore operations make sense, and at least in some areas we have some compelling evidence that it won’t. Cook Inlet in Alaska has seen sporadic-at-best interest from the industry in recent years; there is really only one company operating there, Hilcorp, and even it doesn’t seem all that enthused. A state lease sale in June brought in five total bids for areas covering about 21,000 acres, all from Hilcorp, for a total of less than $900,000; a similar state sale a year earlier, offering royalty-free leases, brought in just three bids from Hilcorp for less than $200,000.

Federal lease sales in the area have been canceled at various points for lack of industry interest; the most recent completed sale, in 2022, brought in $63,983 of Hilcorp’s cash. It was overturned by a federal court that found the government failed to consider environmental impacts — a process that, in theory, the Trump administration will still have to engage in to move forward with its dozens of new sales.

“There’s no world in which we will allow the Trump administration to hold dozens of oil sales in public waters, putting Americans, wildlife, and the planet in harm’s way, without abiding by the law,” said Brettny Hardy, an attorney with the non-profit Earthjustice, in a statement on Tuesday that noted the group is ready to challenge any unlawful attempts to sell off offshore acreage. “Even with its passage of the worst environmental bill in U.S. history, the Republican-led Congress did not exempt these offshore oil sales from needing to comply with our nation’s environmental statutes.”