The Nickel Report

In Executive Order 14008 President Biden paused oil and gas lease sales on public lands and offshore waters. Thereafter, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) canceled Lease Sales 258 (in Alaska's Cook Inlet) and 259 (in the Gulf of Mexico). Congress, however, required BOEM to hold both lease sales in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Below, we briefly summarize recent developments for each lease sale and subsequent opportunities available to upstream oil and gas companies.

On October 18, 2022, the Department of the Interior announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on December 6, 2022, for areas on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off central and northern California.

This will be the first-ever offshore wind lease sale on America’s west coast and the first-ever U.S. sale to support potential commercial-scale floating offshore wind energy development. Auction details, lease terms, and qualified bidding companies that can participate in the auction will be outlined in a Final Sale Notice (FSN) to be published in the Federal Register later this week.

The Gulf of Mexico (GOM) has long been home to offshore energy development, but with President Biden’s call to advance offshore wind development, a new change is potentially coming to the horizon—wind farms. At the helm of GOM wind development is the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), who has now announced the solicitation of public comments on two potential wind energy areas (WEA) off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana and the related environmental assessment (EA) for the entire GOM Call Area.

The United States’ first major offshore wind energy project is running into delays as federal agencies internally debate whether the project plan adequately protects the fishing industry.

Vineyard Wind—an approximately 800 megawatt, 84-turbine wind energy project to be located roughly 15 miles off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts—is scheduled to begin construction this year and would have the capacity to power over 400,000 homes by 2021.