Big Wind -- Joined at the Hip with Big Oil
To put turbines in the water millions of acres are required to be offered for offshore oil and gas drilling.
On August 14, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will be selling off just shy of 278,000 acres of seabed to develop into wind-energy areas. This sale includes locations off the Delaware and Maryland coast some 26 nautical miles from Delaware Bay, one of the most important migratory sites for shorebirds in the world.
The other lease area up for grabs is off Virginia, 35 nautical miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, another area of high ecological importance. These hundreds of thousands of acres of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) will have the distinction of joining over two-and-a-half-million acres of Atlantic Ocean seabed already leased out by the United States and currently in various stages of offshore wind development.
Now, it’s not as if BOEM holds these auctions all helter-skelter or anything. It’s a very official process that’s intimately involved with offshore oil and gas drilling. The upcoming August auction for offshore wind was made possible by the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sale number 261.
Held on December 2023 “as required by the Inflation Reduction Act” auction 261 sold 1.7 million acres of Gulf seabed to the highest bidders, which included Chevron, BP, Shell, and Equinor. The full offering was 72.7 million acres, of which BOEM had originally removed six million acres due to pressure over impacts to the Rice’s Whale, later reversed in court. This species, which is unique to the Gulf of Mexico, is the most critically endangered of all large whales, with only 51 remaining on Earth.
A ‘climate suicide pact.’
Auction 261, the largest oil and gas offshore lease offering in over eight years, was long planned. Included in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 are provisions that state BOEM “may not issue a lease for offshore wind development unless the agency has offered at least 60 million acres for oil and gas leasing on the outer continental shelf in the previous year.” That provision will be in effect until 2032.
At the time, many environmental groups described the IRA as a sucker punch coming from a president who had promised “no more drilling…”, or as Brett Hartl, affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity called it, a “climate suicide pact.” But that was then. Now, many wind turbine enthusiasts insist that groups protesting offshore wind are funded by the oil industry.
But the IRA had some other tricks up its 700-page sleeve.
One little-known provision in the 1953 U.S. Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) is a section that gives a president the authority to remove unleased areas of the OCS from being offered for development.
Both Presidents Obama and Trump placed certain areas under restriction. However, the IRA canceled all that, opening up previously withdrawn sections of the OCS for offshore wind development. One area currently part of the August BOEM auction -- lease 0558, totaling 176,505 acres -- falls practically within a section (NJ18-11, Currituck Sound) that Trump had withdrawn until 2032.
Although Trump did withdraw areas of the OCS, he also tried to undo previous presidential withdrawals during his administration, attempting to reactivate areas of offshore Alaska for oil and gas drilling that Obama had taken off the table for development.
As the law firm WilmerHale describes it, the challenge by numerous environmental groups successfully stopped the reversal. “Section 12(a) (of the OCSLA) permits a president only to withdraw lands from disposition but does not authorize a president to revoke a prior withdrawal,” which would take an act of Congress.
Despite the numerous environmental provisions offshore wind blatantly violates, which include the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and even stipulations prohibiting environmental damage in the very lease that permits Big Wind to conduct its activities, leasing and construction on wind-turbine projects continue to forge ahead.
And as they do, so will offshore oil and gas drilling -- despite a commonly held belief that this so-called “green energy” option will somehow make them go away.
So, it's not a choice between undersea oil drilling and so-called "windmills" (a euphemism for industrial sea monsters), but rather more like the worst of both worlds.
If the object of the game were to simply create the most cost efficient energy source, the biggest bang for our buck, the most power with the least environmental intrusion, the winning play would be nuclear ☢️ power. We would still need crude and coal. Of course we could use a combo perhaps harnessing wind and hydro in places least likely to cause harm.
But, as seems to be the case on even mundane, daily, local levels, money is always the driver. And so until MAN stops himself from being perpetually, myopically and helplessly motivated by accumulating money - at any cost!!! - we as a global society will never solve these problems. But we cannot just ditch “all fossil fuels” as we are wholly dependent on them, top to bottom. Crushing our economy while adversarial nations continue apace, will only doom us in the end.