“The US Gulf of Mexico has been the backbone of US energy production for years, providing more than one million boe/d for the last two decades,” API Vice President of Upstream Policy Holly Hopkins said. “The decisions made regarding future leasing will have short- and long-term implications for our nation’s energy and national security, job creation, and government revenue.”
In addition to submitting comments on the Call for Information, the associations joined with the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) and the Offshore Operators Committee (OOC) to submit comments in response to BOEM’s Notice of Intent to Prepare a Gulf of Mexico Regional Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.
In both comment letters, the associations highlighted the Biden administration’s repeated attempts to restrict energy production in the US Gulf of Mexico, including issuing an unlawful moratorium on oil and gas lease sales, cancelling offshore sales, allowing the five-year programme for federal offshore leasing to expire, adding unjustified restrictions and removing acreage from a congressionally-mandated lease sale and issuing a final five-year programme with the fewest lease sales in history. The associations urged Interior to end the bureaucratic delays, including additional NEPA reviews, and move forward with region-wide lease sales as soon as possible.
“Without the right implementation, the administration’s five-year programme will become a mere paper exercise instead of an actionable vehicle for strengthening US energy security,” Hopkins concluded.
