April 25, 2025 — Senators Susan Collins and Angus King are cosponsoring a bipartisan bill to ban offshore drilling off the coast of Maine and New England.
The New England Coastal Protection Act would ban oil and gas leasing off the coast and in protected areas.
NOAA Fisheries reports ocean and coastal industries generate more than $17.5 billion in New England annually.
March 31, 2025 — A federal judge on Thursday blocked an oil and gas lease sale in Gulf waters off the coast of Louisiana, finding that a federal agency didn’t adequately take into account how new offshore drilling would impact the highly endangered Rice’s whale.
The ruling from Judge Amit Mehta in the U.S. District court for the District of Columbia will require the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, which oversees the sale of oil and gas leases in federal waters, to conduct additional environmental reviews before the lease sale proceeds. The current lease sale is not canceled, but will be subject to additional environmental review.
The court also ruled that BOEM did not fully take into account the impact of greenhouse gas emissions that would result from the new oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico, also referred to as the Gulf of America after President Donald Trump moved to rename it via executive order.
“BOEM acted arbitrarily by failing to address the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS’s) determination that the whale’s habitat range extends into the western and central Gulf,” Mehta wrote in his ruling.
January 14, 2025 — With the clock ticking down on his time in office, President Joe Biden announced Jan. 6 that he has permanently protected more than 625 million acres of the U.S. ocean from offshore drilling.
Delaware’s coastline falls within this ban. In all, the area includes the entire eastern U.S. Atlantic coast and the eastern Gulf of Mexico; the Pacific coast along California, Oregon, and Washington; and the remaining portion of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area in Alaska.
“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,” said Biden in a statement announcing the ban.
This isn’t the first action to protect Delaware’s coastline from offshore drilling. Back in 2018, state legislators passed two bills prohibiting oil and natural gas drilling in state waters.
January 8, 2025 — U.S. President Joe Biden has implemented new protections limiting offshore oil and gas drilling operations across broad swaths of the U.S. coast, preserving 635 million acres of ocean from future oil or gas leasing.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: Drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks. 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.”
January 6, 2025 — President Joe Biden is moving to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters, a last-minute effort to block possible action by the incoming Trump administration to expand offshore drilling.
Biden, whose term expires in two weeks, said he is using authority under the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future oil and natural gas leasing.
“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,” Biden said in a statement Monday.
“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.
Biden’s orders would not affect large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, where most U.S. offshore drilling occurs, but it would protect coastlines along California, Florida and other states from future drilling.
January 3, 2024 — President Biden is expected to permanently ban new oil and gas drilling in large sections of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as other federal waters, in a way that could be difficult for the Trump administration to unwind, according to two people familiar with the plans.
Mr. Biden intends to invoke an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, that would give him wide latitude to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing, said the people. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the policy publicly.
The ban would be a significant victory for environmental advocates who have long argued that new drilling is inconsistent with the need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning oil and gas that are dangerously warming the planet. The year that just ended was the hottest in recorded history.
The move would also cement Mr. Biden’s legacy on climate change as he prepares to leave the White House after a single term. President-elect Donald J. Trump has pledged to reverse virtually every law and regulation aimed at curbing carbon dioxide emissions, and to make it easier for companies to produce and burn more coal, oil and gas.
October 22, 2024 — A federal judge has agreed to give NOAA Fisheries until next spring to complete its revised analysis of how offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico could harm the critically endangered Rice’s whale.
The decision is a key reprieve for the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration. NOAA Fisheries was originally slated to lose its existing analysis Dec. 20, which threatened to temporarily shut down new and existing offshore development in the region. A finalized analysis must be in place for companies to proceed with offshore oil and gas drilling.
NOAA Fisheries (NMFS) will now have until May 21, 2025, before the existing analysis — called a biological opinion or BiOp — will be tossed out by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
August 21, 2024 — A U.S. judge at the urging of environmental groups has thrown out an assessment by a federal agency governing how endangered and threatened marine species should be protected from oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Monday ruled the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Services’ so-called “biological opinion” was flawed and did not adequately address risks species face from oil spills and vessel strikes.
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
December 3, 2021 — A slew of climate provisions in Democrats’ roughly $2 trillion social spending bill face an uncertain future in the Senate. But there’s one big exception: limits on offshore oil and gas drilling.
Democrats, aides and environmentalists feel confident that the prevention of oil and gas drilling in most U.S. waters will survive scrutiny in the Senate, including from key centrist Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
Under the version of the Build Back Better Act that passed the House last month, new offshore drilling would be permanently prohibited in three major regions: the Atlantic, the Pacific and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
Other policies aimed at limiting oil and gas development have inspired fierce partisan divides on Capitol Hill. But coastal lawmakers of both parties have rallied around preventing drilling off their coastlines. For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) earlier this year introduced the “American Shores Protection Act,” which would codify a temporary moratorium on drilling off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.