Legal petitions have been filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by environmental groups and oil and gas interests challenging the Biden administration’s plan to offer additional Gulf of Mexico drilling leases. The congressionally mandated five-year plan includes three sales — the least number being offered since 1980, reported […]
The U.S. held its first auction of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico in more than a year on Wednesday. The sale — mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — garnered $264 million in offers from oil companies, including BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil. The auction in federal waters came just […]
Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, sued the Biden administration Monday to stop the sale of oil and gas drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico. The lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC federal court, seeks to prevent the auction of approximately 13,600 blocks on 73.3 million acres by the U.S. Department of the […]
The Biden administration on Wednesday reinstated nearly $190 million in bids from fossil fuel companies for an oil-and-gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico that had previously been invalidated by a federal judge. The move was one of the compromises struck between Democratic party leaders and pro-fossil-fuel Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia in […]
Midsummer is the time for forecasts of the size of this year’s “dead zones” and algal blooms in major lakes and bays. Will the Gulf of Mexico dead zone be the size of New Jersey, or only as big as Connecticut? Will Lake Erie’s bloom blossom to a human health crisis, or just devastate the coastal economy?
In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan triggered an underwater mudslide, which caused an oil production platform owned by Taylor Energy Co. LLC to collapse. The company capped nine oil wells, but the remaining 16 remained open, spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This spill, the country’s longest-lasting, is still ongoing, and in a new count, […]
President Joe Biden’s Interior Department confirmed on Wednesday that it has canceled three lease sales that would have opened millions of acres of ocean to oil and gas drilling. Two of the lease sales would have taken place in the Gulf of Mexico and a third would have taken place off the coast of Alaska […]
What happens to oil after an oil spill? Previously, scientists have focused on one of three fates: it is degraded by microorganisms, it evaporates or it ends up on the beach. But a new study of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reveals another option. Almost 10 percent of the […]
In a huge win for environmental groups, a federal judge has canceled more than 80 million acres of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Biden administration failed to sufficiently take climate change into consideration when […]