As part of the Trump’s administration’s effort to expand fossil fuel production in the United States, the Department of the Interior announced last week that it would accelerate the permitting process for a range of energy sources and seek new oil and gas lease sales in offshore waters, including in the Gulf of Maine.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the permitting changes — which speed up review under the National Environmental Policy and Endangered Species Acts, among others — would cut what is often a multi-year review process down to several weeks.
Environmental groups and Maine lawmakers decried the moves while oil and gas industry representatives celebrated them. Days later, a group of New England Senators, including Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, introduced legislation to ban offshore drilling in waters throughout New England.
“The waters off Maine’s coast provide a healthy ecosystem for our fisheries and are an integral part of our tourism industry, supporting thousands of jobs and generating billions of dollars in revenue each year,” said Collins in a statement. “Offshore drilling along the coast could impact Mainers of all walks of life for generations.”
There is no specific timeline for when the offshore oil and gas leases would go up for sale; the first step in the process is to seek public comment on the proposal, which includes a new five-year lease schedule for most of the coastline of the United States, as well as a new area in the Arctic. It has been decades since an oil and gas lease sale was held on the Eastern seaboard, which has moved in recent years toward offshore wind.
The plans are a sharp turn from the Biden administration, which included just three new oil and gas lease opportunities — the fewest in the history of the program.
The changes come after President Trump declared an “energy emergency” on his first day in office, an announcement he has used to attempt to speed up permitting for oil, gas and coal projects and the pipelines and facilities to support them while simultaneously blocking thousands of megawatts of planned offshore wind projects.
Last month, the federal government ordered the University of Maine to stop activity on $15.8 million in offshore wind research projects, including one that has been in the works for more than a decade and is already partially launched.
But experts have said there’s little evidence the U.S. is facing an energy crisis.
“It’s a little bit of a challenge to say we’re actually dealing with a kind of energy emergency that was described by the President because we’re producing more energy now than we ever have,” Joe Aldy, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said in an interview last month on the Environmental Insights podcast.
“When we look at the fact that we’re at record highs in oil production, gas production, and renewable power production on the supply side, we’re not necessarily facing what one might think of as an emergency when it comes to energy.”
This isn’t the first time there have been calls for more offshore oil exploration in the Gulf of Maine. A coalition of governors — including former Maine Governor Paul LePage — revived the idea a decade ago, according to reporting in the Portland Press Herald, and the first Trump administration also pushed for lease expansion.
But decades of research have shown that the Gulf of Maine has very little oil and gas production potential. That is in part because most of the rocks below the seafloor were heated to such high temperatures when they formed that their organic components were converted to graphite rather than oil, which is generated between temperatures of 80 and 150 degrees celsius.
The area with the highest potential for commercial oil and gas production is in Georges Bank, a relatively shallow plateau east of Massachusetts. There was some exploration there in the 1970s and 1980s but no commercial production.
Georges Bank, however, is also one of the most productive fisheries in the world, “single-handedly responsible for the development of coastal fisheries” in Maine and Massachusetts, according to a 2009 paper published by the Maine Geological Survey.
“In plain English, the geology doesn’t support commercial viability,” John Filostrat, a spokesman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, told the Press Herald in 2015. “Based on the assessment of the data we have, there’s no resource potential in the Gulf of Maine.”
