California Excluded from Proposed OCS Drilling Plan

The Department of the Interior released its proposed five-year offshore oil drilling program that would prevent new offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans while allowing 10 sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the Cook Inlet off south-central Alaska. The areas as the same as in the prior five-year program. Federal law requires the department to develop five-year plans for drilling on the outer continental shelf (OCS).

The Proposed Program for the 2023-2028 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program (National OCS Program), and its Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the 2023-2028 Program (Draft PEIS) will be open for comment for 90 days, which ends October 6, 2022.

The Proposed Program is the second of three required steps for approving a final program. It follows the 2018 publication of the Draft Proposed Program (DPP). The Proposed Program reduces the number of leases from the 47 leases proposed in the DPP. Any area or sale not included in the Proposed Program will not be considered for inclusion in the final 2023–2028 National OCS Program.

The proposal was met with opposition from both environmental groups that wanted a plan with no new leasing, and oil industry groups that pushed for more areas to be opened for leasing to counter rising global oil prices. New areas would likely not be leased until 2024 or 2025.

President Biden has generally opposed new leases for offshore oil drilling. In January 2021, he issued Executive Order 14008, which ordered a pause in new oil and gas leases on federal lands, including offshore. The moratorium has faced legal challenges, however. See California’s Energy Transition from Oil State to Fossil Free: Introduction Part Three—Offshore Drilling.