With just a few days left in office, President Biden on January 6 made a final effort to shape U.S. energy policy and development by permanently banning new oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of coastal waters. Using an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Land Shelf Act (OCLSA), the president signed an executive order banning future drilling in federal waters off the Eastern Seaboard, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the West Coast and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska. The ban is largely just for show, but in today’s RBN blog we’ll discuss why it might cause headaches for the “drill, baby, drill” Trump administration.
The authority for Biden’s order comes from the little-known OCLSA. In short, the 72-year-old law created a framework for balancing environmental concerns with offshore exploration and development. The law says explicitly that the president may, “from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the Outer Continental Shelf.”
Biden is not the first president to take significant action to limit drilling under that authority. In December 2016, then-President Obama made a similar order just one month before Trump took office eight years ago. Obama banned offshore oil and gas drilling in the “vast majority” of the U.S.-owned northern waters — including large areas of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans — using that same 1953 law. He declared these areas as “indefinitely off limits” to future leasing, a move intended to make the ban permanent. In 2017, newly elected President Trump sought to reverse Obama’s ban but a federal judge kept the restrictions in place and said the law allows presidents to withdraw areas from drilling but does not give them the sole power to reinstate previously withdrawn areas. (For more on the potential to reinstate previously withdrawn areas, see below.) Obama’s December 2016 executive order is still in place and impacts policy going forward.
In September 2020, then-President Trump issued an executive order to withdraw the eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico along with the South Atlantic and the Straits of Florida (the waters between the Florida Keys and Cuba) from oil leasing for 10 years. This was intended as a political measure to sway swing voters in the Sunshine State. But Trump’s action was focused on a more specific area — water near Florida and the Southeastern U.S. (red-and-gray striped area in Figure 1 below) — and had a limited timeframe of 2022 to 2032.
Figure 1. U.S. Offshore Production Areas. Source: RBN
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