President Biden announced on Monday what he called a permanent stop to new oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters, saying he was making the move because drilling posed unnecessary risks to the environment, public health and the coastal communities’ economies.
The ban is part of an effort to fortify Mr. Biden’s environmental legacy in ways that some experts believe could not be quickly reversed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has heavy support from the oil and gas industry and has promised to expand drilling.
Mr. Biden also intends on Tuesday to announce two new national monuments in California, preserving more than 800,000 acres of ecologically fragile and culturally significant tribal lands.
Mr. Biden called it a climate imperative to block offshore drilling on about 20 percent of the nearly 3.2 billion acres of seabed controlled by the United States. He is relying on an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which he says gives him the authority for this executive order. The measure prevents new drilling along the entire Eastern Seaboard; along the Pacific Coast along California, Oregon and Washington; in the eastern Gulf of Mexico; and in the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.
In many ways, the ban is symbolic. There has been almost no oil and gas exploration off California’s shores since an enormous oil spill near Santa Barbara in 1969 that shocked the nation. Drilling in Arctic federal waters is currently limited to a single facility in the Beaufort Sea. Mr. Trump himself imposed a 10-year moratorium on drilling along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida when he was courting voters in those states during his re-election campaign in 2020. And the eastern Gulf of Mexico has been under some form of drilling moratorium since 2006.
“The relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
The executive order would not stop new drilling in the central and western areas of the Gulf of Mexico, some of which has been mandated by Congress. The Gulf produces nearly 15 percent of the nation’s oil and accounts for about 97 percent of U.S. offshore gas production.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Mr. Biden said.
“As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren,” he said.
In his reasoning, he also invoked the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 workers and causing the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Mr. Biden called it “a solemn reminder of the costs and risks of offshore drilling.”
Mr. Trump, who mocks global warming, has promised to erase Mr. Biden’s climate policies, withdraw the United States from the global fight to prevent the planet from overheating and grant the oil industry virtually unrestricted access to America’s public lands and waters.
Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, called Mr. Biden’s ban “a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people,” whom she asserted gave Mr. Trump a “mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices.” She continued: “Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
The United States is already producing more oil than any nation at any time in history. It is also the world’s largest producer of gas, as well as the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas.
“Offshore drilling can cause immense harm to coastal communities, pollute the ocean and harm wildlife,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “History has unfortunately taught us that oil and gas drilling in the ocean inherently risks catastrophe. President Biden’s leasing withdrawal helps limit this risk and prevents oil and gas companies from lining their pockets at the public’s expense.”
Preventing new drilling might also reduce the burning of fossil fuels that produce the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet, environmental groups said.
The International Energy Agency has found that new oil and gas development must stop if the world is to stay within safe limits of global warming. Nearly every nation on the planet agreed in 2015 to limit warming from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above levels before the Industrial Revolution. The planet has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius. The year that just ended was the hottest in recorded history.
Mark S. Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Law at Tulane University in New Orleans, called the ban a “big deal.” Coastal communities live under the periodic threat that drilling suspensions could be lifted, and a permanent ban promises long-term confidence, particularly for the tourism and fishing industries.
“President Biden is drawing the line and saying, if you will, that the era of uncertainty is over and I’m closing the door to exploration and production in these areas,” Mr. Davis said.
Oil and gas executives said Mr. Biden’s ban could be disastrous for the industry’s future.
“With global demand continuing to rise, there’s always uncertainty about where the supply is going to continue to come from,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore oil, gas and wind producers. “You don’t want to take options off the table where it could bolster our economic and national security. It’s about making sure we have a well thought-out, long term energy policy that gives us the flexibility to adjust when the demand scenario requires it.”
The ban would not affect the offshore wind industry, which the Biden administration has strongly supported.
Mr. Milito called the ban “patently political.”
Ron Neal, the chairman of the offshore committee of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, an oil and gas trade group, called the ban “significant and catastrophic.”
Mr. Trump is widely expected to try to repeal the ban after his inauguration on Jan. 20. Such an effort could be challenged by environmental groups, and several legal experts said there was a strong chance that Mr. Biden’s ban could survive.
While section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act gives the president wide leeway to bar drilling, it does not include language that would allow any president to revoke a ban.
Mr. Trump has already tried and failed to repeal such a prohibition. In 2015, President Barack Obama banned offshore drilling in about 98 percent of federally owned Arctic waters as well as 3.8 million acres of the Atlantic Ocean home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish.
Mr. Trump repealed the order and environmental groups, led by the nonprofit Earthjustice, sued. In 2019, a Federal District Court judge in Alaska ruled that the ban could not be undone without an act of Congress.
“It’s unquestionably within Biden’s powers to do this and there’s a big legal question about whether Trump can undo it ,” said Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
While the case could be a powerful precedent for Mr. Biden, others noted that it was never fully resolved.
The Trump administration appealed. But then Mr. Biden won the 2020 election. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to dismiss the case and Mr. Biden’s administration reissued Mr. Obama’s bans. Moreover, some lawyers argue that the Alaska ruling applies only to that state.
“I would view it as an unsettled issue and certainly one that the new administration will continue to pursue,” said Ann D. Navaro, a partner at Bracewell, a law firm that advises energy clients.
Republicans, who will control both chambers in the new Congress, might also try to amend the 1953 law to allow presidents to reverse the drilling bans of their predecessors.
That, however, would require a at least 60 votes in the Senate to clear procedural hurdles, which would be challenging with Republicans holding just a three-seat majority.
The party also could try to use an upcoming budget reconciliation process to require the Interior Department to offer leases in the areas covered by the ban. That would require only a simple majority.
But Mr. Davis said Republicans from coastal states seem unlikely to support such a move.
“A mandate would require the congressional delegation in Florida, in the Carolinas, to say yes. And they’ve never done that, as President Trump found out when he initially proposed opening up those states,” Mr. Davis said, noting how Mr. Trump in 2018 tried to open all American waters to drilling but faced an immediate backlash from his own party and quickly walked back his effort.
He called the protests of the oil industry “theater.”
“It’s their job to want to be able to go wherever they want when they want,” Mr. Davis said. But, he added, of the areas banned by Mr. Biden: “They don’t really expect to go there. There is no pressure to ‘drill, baby, drill’ in any of these areas.”
