November 9, 2022 — Results from the U.S. election on Tuesday, 8 November are still being tallied, with control of Congress at stake.
Predictions of a Republican sweep of the midterm elections, seen in part as a referendum on U.S. President Joe Biden and Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, did not materialize in early results.
October 27, 2022 — A state agency held off, at least for now, approving projects aimed at bringing power from offshore wind farms to land, but it did allow for $1 billion to upgrade the existing power grid.
The Board of Public Utilities balked at the more expensive projects needed to begin building what is essentially a backbone transmission system off the coast to deliver power ashore. Instead, it opted to wait until federal financial incentives are available to defray the costs to utility customers.
A law signed by President Joe Biden this summer provides lucrative tax credits to operators of offshore wind farms, but those credits are not available to most transmission projects. Several developers had sought approval from the state to build offshore transmission lines from the wind farms to the grid.
Many clean-energy advocates contend a backbone offshore wind transmission system is the most cost-effective and least environmentally disruptive way of connecting offshore power to the customers who need it. By midcentury, offshore wind farms are supposed to provide 27% of the state’s electricity. No offshore wind farm is operating in New Jersey.
August 25, 2022 — Trae Cooper risks punctures to the fiberglass hull of his grandfather’s boat every time he pulls out into the gray waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Trawling for shrimp that swim along Louisiana’s muddy coast means coexisting with the forgotten pipelines, corroded steel, gnawed plastic and bits of iron that the oil industry left behind as it marched gradually through these marshes and out to sea.
And that’s why Cooper, 39, and many shrimpers in the region say they know enough to worry as a new industry crops up in the Gulf of Mexico: offshore wind.
They wonder if transmission lines will add to the dangers that shrimpers and other commercial fishers already have to dodge, if turbines will take away places they could be shrimping, and if its planning will be done with shrimpers’ input taken seriously.
“If you got a whole field of wind turbines, you may knock out 2 miles of our fishing grounds. That’s a problem, not mentioning the transmission and everything that goes into it,” Cooper said.
Offshore wind appears imminent in the Gulf, one branch of President Joe Biden’s push to lift 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, helping to decarbonize the nation’s electricity grid in a fight against climate change. The administration is planning a first Gulf offshore wind auction by early next year, after finishing an environmental review of the industry’s impacts — including to marine life and fisheries.
August 23, 2022 — The Gulf of Mexico offshore oil industry will be critical in helping its frequent nemesis President Joe Biden achieve one of his most obtainable climate ambitions: raising wind farms in the ocean.
Welders and machinists from Louisiana and Texas are building the nation’s first offshore wind supply vessels and turbine installation ships. Jack-up vessel crews helped plant the first of thousands of turbines in the Atlantic Ocean and hope to raise more. Oil companies, with their decades of experience launching projects at sea, are expected to be at the front of the line when the Interior Department conducts the first lease sale for wind in the Gulf of Mexico next year.
But locals in the ports across south Louisiana are quick to point out the region isn’t ready to ditch its rigs. If anything, the embrace of offshore wind showcases a Gulf oil sector that remains mostly confident in the face of the energy transition.
“When wind energy comes to Louisiana, I think Louisiana will open their arms and say, ‘Yeah, come on, let’s do it,’” said Tommy Brown with Aries Marine Corp., one of the oil services companies that supplied lift boats and operators that helped build the first offshore wind farm in the country in Rhode Island in 2015. “[But] people need to understand that, look, you can’t just flip a switch and go from oil and gas to renewables.”
That sentiment is common across the Gulf Coast. The region demonstrates perhaps more than anywhere else in the country the entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry, even as the Biden administration tries to drive an energy transformation that includes a commitment to approve 16 offshore wind arrays by 2030 to help decarbonize the grid by 2035.
In Louisiana, offshore wind could provide new jobs for workers laid off by an oil sector that becomes more efficient through each price bust, and it is poised to inject adrenaline into the shipbuilding industry. Long term, wind may even become a strong, albeit smaller, industry with its own workforce of wind technicians and manufacturers along the Gulf Coast, pushing clean power onto the grid.
July 25, 2022 — The following was released by the Massachusetts Fishermen’s Partnership, Massachusetts Seafood Collaborative, and Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island:
Speaking from a podium at the former Brayton Point power plant in Somerset on Wednesday, President Biden appropriately described climate change as a clear and present danger that puts the health of U.S. citizens and communities at stake. But his proposed slate of solutions, largely focused on further expansion of offshore wind energy on the continental shelf, fell short of the ambition needed to address the problem and may actually endanger coastal communities more than climate change alone would do.
The Rhode Island and Massachusetts fishing families and seafood businesses that our organizations represent are experiencing the effects of warming waters and increased storminess firsthand, and there is no doubt that robust climate action is needed to sustain local marine ecosystems, shore up our combined states’ $3.7 billion in annual seafood sales, safeguard our 81,000 fishing-dependent jobs, and preserve our members’ ability to supply the public with fresh, high-quality wild fish and shellfish. But although our organizations are broadly supportive of meaningful action to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we are dismayed at the president’s narrow focus on fast-tracking and scaling up industrial offshore wind, which is one of the most ecologically invasive forms of renewable energy available.
Since taking office, the Biden administration has willfully ignored the concerns of fishermen and fisheries managers about industrial offshore wind development, and the President’s recent speech perpetuates a delusion that offshore wind energy is environmentally benign. For example, while showcasing the Brayton Point location’s conversion from a coal-fired power plant to an offshore wind manufacturing and staging facility, the President cheerfully described the miles of subsea cable and the 2,500-ton steel foundations that will be produced at locations like this one. But he made no mention of the electromagnetic fields that these cables will emit once they are placed underwater, the massive amounts of copper that will need to be mined in order to manufacture these cables, or the disruptive underwater noise and vibrations that will be created by pounding thousands of these foundations into the seafloor.
Similarly, the President’s speech touted new jobs that will be created by the wind industry but said nothing of the existing fishing jobs that will be put at risk by displacement from fishing grounds, increased safety risks and insurance costs, and uncertainty about the future of fishery resources.
Across the U.S., fishing communities have called for stronger environmental review of offshore wind proposals, including thorough programmatic environmental impact statements to be carried out prior to any wind farm leasing or permitting in an area. Unfortunately, President Biden’s recent remarks suggest that these concerns continue to fall on deaf ears.
Announcing that “the ocean is open for the clean energy of our future,” the President vowed to “clear every federal hurdle and streamline federal permitting that brings these clean energy projects online right now and right away.” In our view, federal permitting processes for industrial development on the continental shelf should be made more stringent, not easier to clear, and the timeline for development should not be sped up but slowed down, in order to allow for comprehensive impacts assessment and adaptive management. The unknowable dangers that ocean industrialization poses not only to commercially valuable fish but also to marine mammals, physical oceanography, avian species, and the entire marine food web are serious and must be confronted before development can proceed.
In the next few weeks, President Biden is expected to roll out a series of executive actions aiming to fill the gap left by Congress’ failure to enact much-needed climate legislation. As he prepares these actions, we call upon the President to redirect the emphasis of his proposals towards the vast array of available fishery friendly climate solutions that are available and to prioritize those that: provide environmental co-benefits by sequestering carbon along the coastline, support small-scale energy production that puts dollars back into local communities instead of shipping it offshore, avoid industrial sprawl by leveraging the already-built environment, and prioritize energy efficiency and demand reduction to diminish the total amount of energy production required. Meanwhile, we insist that any offshore wind development that does take place must be consistent with the stepwise harm reduction approach embodied in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which guides developers to (1) avoid, (2) minimize, (3) rectify, (4) reduce, and (5) compensate those affected for any impacts, in that order, with full transparency and participation by affected fishing interests.
In closing, we comment that the Brayton Point power plant site is deeply symbolic of the environmental short-sightedness that often accompanies energy development. From the 1960s to the 2000s, heated discharge water from this plant containing chlorine and other deadly chemicals decimated the winter flounder resource that once supported year-round fisheries in Mount Hope Bay and Narragansett Bay. As happens all too frequently, fishermen’s concerns about the plant’s environmental impacts were ignored until it was too late.
Future energy development must avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. We call upon elected leaders to address the climate crisis hand-in-hand with affected communities in ways that work for local environments and existing industries, not at their expense.
July 25, 2022 — Nearly 1,150 square miles in the western Gulf of Mexico are proposed for offshore wind energy areas, as President Biden said he would do everything within his executive powers to act on climate issues and developing cleaner energy.
The cumulative effect of climate change “is definitely a clear and present danger,” Biden said at Brayton Point in Somerset, Mass., where the old generating site is being redeveloped to manufacture power cables for wind projects off southern New England.
“We see it in America, in red states and blue states,” said Biden, “seeing 100-year droughts happening every few years” and massive damage from hurricanes. “This is an emergency and I’ll look at it that way.”
“Today Brayton Point is on the frontier of clean energy,” he said. In a speech peppered with references to construction jobs, shipbuilding and new manufacturing, he called the site on example of future economic opportunity.
“When I think clean energy, I think jobs,” said Biden.
Timed with Biden’s address, yesterday the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced it was seeking public input on the identification of two potential WEAs in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM).
July 14, 2022 — A climate activist, mineral economist and former Army Corps regional director are among the officials crafting President Joe Biden’s closely watched strategy for offshore energy, which could shape the direction of renewables and oil drilling for years.
Working in and around the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, they are helping steer the Biden administration’s approach to offshore oil and gas leasing and its ambitious plans to transition the nation’s oceans toward clean energy at a pivotal moment for both.
Previously focused on managing the oil industry’s access to federal stores of crude and natural gas off the nation’s coasts, BOEM is in the throes of an internal transition to meet this political moment. Its current crew of leaders reflects a unique period in the 11-year-old agency’s history and the varied nature of its growing responsibilities.
Interior and the bureau recently released a draft five-year oil program that could lead to 11 offshore oil auctions in the coming years, potentially jettisoning Biden’s lofty campaign promise to end new leasing. But the Biden administration’s proposal also suggested the possibility of going in a different direction, holding zero new lease sales between 2023 and 2028 in what would be an epic shift for the offshore oil sector.
The new bureau took over the leasing responsibility of offshore energy, while other agencies were crafted to handle the money coming from oil royalties and fees and the day-to-day safety and environmental oversight of offshore drilling.
Last month, BOEM announced that James Bennett, its long-standing chief of the office of renewable programs, has moved to a new, ambiguous role within the renewables arena at BOEM that has led to some speculation in the offshore wind industry that the Interior bureaucrat who built BOEM’s renewables approach may soon leave the agency.
Other relative newcomers to the bureau with critical roles include Marissa Knodel, an adviser in a political liaison position that’s long existed at BOEM and operates out of the public eye. She is one of the BOEM cohorts working directly with the White House to align bureau actions with Biden’s political realities.
Another less visible figure critical in BOEM’s direction is Tommy Beaudreau, the Interior deputy secretary who is second in command at the department under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
It was during Beaudreau’s tenure that BOEM first got serious about offshore wind and held its first offshore wind auctions in 2013. But it may be his oil and gas bona fides that matter most as the administration navigates its five-year offshore oil plan. He led BOEM in the years leading up to the last five-year plan and was involved in the consideration of shifting from regionwide oil and gas auctions in the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf-wide sales — a flip often associated with the Trump administration.
July 6, 2022 — A federal judge on Tuesday threw out a host of actions by the Trump administration to roll back protections for endangered or threatened species, a year after the Biden administration said it was moving to strengthen such species protections.
U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in Northern California eliminated the Trump-era rules even as two wildlife agencies under President Joe Biden are reviewing or rescinding the regulations. The decision restores a range of protections under the Endangered Species Act — including some that date to the 1970s — while the reviews are completed. Environmental groups hailed the decision, which they said sped up needed protections and critical habitat designations for threatened species, including salmon in the Pacific Northwest.
Tigar’s ruling “spoke for species desperately in need of comprehensive federal protections without compromise,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. “Threatened and endangered species do not have the luxury of waiting under rules that do not protect them.”
The court ruling comes as two federal agencies — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service — review five Endangered Species Act regulations finalized by President Donald Trump’s administration, including critical habitat designations and rules requiring federal agencies to consult with the wildlife or fisheries services before taking actions that could affect threatened or endangered species.
July 6, 2022 — U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday, 1 July, 2022, announced a plan for leasing offshore oil and gas drilling sites over the next five years, which was immediately met with criticism from both supporters of expanding domestic production and environmental groups.
The plan calls for leasing up to 11 sites for drilling between 2023 and 2028. All but one of the sites would be in the Gulf of Mexico, with the other proposed site in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. That is a sharp reduction from the Trump administration’s now-nixed plans for 47 lease-sites over several more regions – including Atlantic and Pacific offshore sites.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
July 1, 2022 — New research from Rutgers University shows Mid-Atlantic surfclam fisheries could see revenue losses from planned offshore wind farms, at least in the short- to medium-term after the development takes place.
The data is sure to fuel opposition from the fishing industry to the Biden administration’s rapid offshore wind development along the New York, New Jersey, and Delaware coasts. President Joe Biden has a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of wind energy by 2030 as part of his effort to tackle climate change.
Clammers and scallop fishermen fear a shrinking patch of fishable ocean will lead to the collapse of the industry.
Surfclam harvests stretching from Maine to Virginia generate about $30 million in annual revenue. The Rutgers study, “The Atlantic Surfclam Fishery and Offshore Wind Energy Development,” published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, used a newly-developed model to determine average revenue reductions between 3 and 15% overall.