Saving Seafood

Trump order opening Arctic Alaska waters to oil leasindraws legal challenge

February 24, 2025 —  Environmental groups on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration to overturn an executive order seeking to open Arctic waters off Alaska, as well as waters in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to oil drilling.

Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, which revoked protective actions taken by Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, violated the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the plaintiffs argue in their lawsuit.

The law “authorizes the President to withdraw unleased lands of the outer continental shelf from disposition. It does not authorize the President to re-open withdrawn areas to disposition,” said the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage and which the plaintiffs said is the first environmental lawsuit filed against the new Trump administration.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior declined to comment, citing a policy of avoiding comments on pending litigation.

Trump’s order seeking to open more areas to leasing, which was followed by an order by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with the same purpose, comes at a time when previous ideas for remote offshore drilling in Alaska appear stalled or fizzled.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

Should Offshore Oil Rigs Be Turned into Artificial Reefs?

November 20, 2024 — Even before I could make out the silhouette of Platform Holly on the foggy horizon, I could see and smell oil. Ripples of iridescent liquid floated on the sea’s surface, reflecting the cloudy sky. But the oil wasn’t coming from a leak or some other failure of the rig. Milton Love, a biologist at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained that it was “kind of bubbling up out of the seafloor.” Our boat, less than two miles from the central California coast, was sailing above a natural oil seep where the offshore energy boom first began.

For thousands of years the Chumash, an Indigenous group native to the region, identified these oceanic seeps and their naturally occurring soft tar, known as malak, which washed up on the shore. Sixteenth-century European explorers noted oil off the coast of modern-­day Santa Barbara, and in the 1870s the U.S. oil boom reached California. In the late 1890s the first offshore oil wells in the world were drilled from piers off of Summerland Beach; 60 years later the state’s first offshore oil platform was deployed to drill the Summerland Offshore Field.

Since then, 34 other oil platforms have been installed along the coast, and more than 12,000 have been installed around the world. These hulking pieces of infrastructure, however, have finite lifetimes. Eventually their oil-producing capacities tail off to the point where it is no longer economically viable to operate them—that, or there’s a spill. Today 13 of California’s 27 remaining offshore platforms are what’s known as shut-in, or no longer producing oil.

Read the full article at Scientific American

US Gulf of Mexico oil firms begin hurricane damage checks, ports reopen

September 13, 2024 — U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil producers on Thursday were conducting safety checks and preparing to restart some output after Hurricane Francine disrupted operations, while a Louisiana oil refinery ramped up production and export ports reopened.

Francine missed Texas and hit the Louisiana coast on Wednesday with up to 100 mph winds (161 kph), knocking out power to up to 375,000 customers and bringing heavy rains and flooding to the state. Its winds dropped quickly and the storm was over southern Mississippi on Thursday where another 14,000 customers were without power.

As drillers began to assess damage, the extent of Francine’s impact on energy production emerged with new, higher estimates of lost output from the 169 offshore platforms evacuated.

Energy producers reported on Thursday they had shut-in 42%, or 730,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Gulf of Mexico oil production and 53%, or nearly 992 million cubic feet of natural gas, offshore regulator Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said.

Read the full article at Reuters

Industry groups appeal court order threatening Gulf of Mexico oil production

September 13, 2024 — The American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil trade group in the United States, has joined forces with several other top energy industry organizations to protest a court order they claim threatens oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.

API, EnerGeo Alliance, the National Ocean Industries Association, and Chevron USA said the order puts “current and future U.S. energy supply” at risk in an appeal filed Wednesday evening.

Read the full article at The Washington Examiner

Top oil trade group warns court order could shut down Gulf of Mexico production

September 10, 2024 — The American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil trade group in the United States, is warning that a court order issued last month could shut down all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil industry group sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Friday, saying that the decision issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland could put the country’s “economic security in jeopardy.”

It comes just weeks after the district court ruled in favor of a number of environmental groups that filed a lawsuit after the National Marine Fisheries Service issued its 2020 Biological Opinion on offshore oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Read the full article at The Washington Examiner

Interior releases rule for high-pressure offshore oil drilling

August 30, 2024 — The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued a final rule for offshore oil development Thursday, dictating how to safely drill into oil reservoirs with extremely high temperatures and pressure.

The offshore oil industry has increasingly shifted toward drilling into deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico, where in some cases the oil reservoir pressure exceeds 15,000 pounds per square inch and temperatures top 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

BSEE’s new requirements are a response to the high risks of drilling in these areas. It was at a high-pressure prospect in 2010 that a failed blowout preventer in an exploratory well led to an explosion that killed 11 men and sank the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Read the full article at E&E News

Interior denies request to avoid offshore oil well cleanup

August 22, 2024 — An Interior Department appellate board has rejected an offshore oil company’s attempt to abandon a 40-year-old oil well off the coast of California without following full decommissioning rules.

Judges at the Interior Board of Land Appeals determined this week that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement “had a rational basis” for denying Noble Energy’s request to abandon the well in the Santa Barbara Channel. It’s been capped since 1985.

Administrative Judge David Gunter and Chief Administrative Judge Silvia Riechel Idziorek said in a ruling that Noble’s justification had focused on shorter-term risks posed by the well, which is located 10 miles from the California coast. BSEE, by contrast, had focused on long-term safety issues like leaks from the wellhead because of corrosion, the judges wrote.

Read the full article at E&E News

Meet the whale that may upend the offshore oil industry

September 27, 2023 — It was a whale of an announcement.

After years of research, scientists said they had discovered an entirely new species of whale swimming right under their noses in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet as soon as scientists identified Rice’s whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale, two years ago, there was a problem. There were hardly any left. With only about 50 remaining, the whale is one of the most endangered marine mammals on Earth.

Now efforts to protect the whale are running headfirst into that other behemoth off the Gulf Coast: the offshore oil and gas industry.

The Biden administration has proposed protecting a massive swath of ocean from Texas to Florida, potentially restricting fossil fuel activity in one of the nation’s top oil-producing spots. Already Biden’s deputies sought to remove millions of acres within its habitat from an offshore oil lease sale originally scheduled for Wednesday.

Offshore oil drillers and Republican lawmakers from Gulf Coast states responded with lawsuits to stop protections they say are economically crippling and hastily executed.

A federal district judge last week agreed, ordering the Biden administration to reverse course on the upcoming lease sale. An appellate court Monday delayed the lease sale until November.

The decision to remove acreage from auction “circumvented the law, ignored science, and bypassed public input,” said Erik Milito, head of the National Ocean Industries Association, an offshore energy lobbying group.

But scientists say oil extraction still poses a clear risk to the whale, with officials estimating the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 wiped out about one-fifth of the population. With so few Rice’s whales left, the loss of even a single individual is devastating for the species.

“The science is quite clear that these whales won’t survive in an environment with such heavy industry,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. “It would just be an incredible tragedy to watch this whale species go extinct, especially so soon after we learned that it was its own species.”

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Jurisdictional question revived in suits over coastal loss

August 6, 2021 — The question of whether lawsuits blaming big oil companies for loss of vulnerable Louisiana coastal wetlands will be tried in state courts, as local parish governments want, or in federal courts, as the oil companies want, has been revived by a federal appeals panel.

Thursday’s ruling at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans was a partial victory for the oil companies and a partial reversal of a decision the same court made a year ago. But a lead attorney for parishes suing the oil companies claimed victory, too, saying the decision effectively means at least 15 of the 42 lawsuits still face state trials — and the remainder could, too, pending more federal court review.

“The decision is in our favor,” lawyer John Carmouche said.

In August 2020, a panel of three 5th Circuit judges upheld federal district judges’ rulings keeping the issue in state court, where coastal parishes’ attorneys want them tried. But the oil companies pressed for reconsideration. Arguments were heard in October, and Judge James Ho, author of the 2020 opinion, wrote Thursday that the district courts should take another look.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Engaging Anglers to Improve Catch and Release Practices and Restore Reef Fish in the Gulf

June 14, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA’s Deepwater Horizon restoration partners at the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission selected three new partners to conduct studies on reef fish restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. They were chosen through a competitive process, and the awards total approximately $690,000.

These studies are contributing to a $30 million project to encourage anglers to use fish descending devices. These devices increase survival of reef fish experiencing barotrauma in the Gulf’s recreational fisheries approved by the Deepwater Horizon Open Ocean Trustees.

Barotrauma is damage caused by the rapid expansion of gases in fish that are caught in deeper water and quickly brought up to the surface. As the gases expand, they can damage the eyes, stomach, and other parts of the fish. This makes it difficult for them to swim back down and survive once released. Descending devices help fish by quickly releasing them at their normal depth, reducing the number of reef fish that die from catch and release fishing.

Read the full release here