The Interior Department forged ahead Wednesday with the Trump administration’s offshore oil and gas agenda by announcing a planned lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico.
The offer of drilling leases in December is slated to cover about 80 million acres. It’s part of President Donald Trump’s push to open more of the Gulf — which he renamed the Gulf of America — to oil and gas development.
Trump is diverting sharply from the Biden administration’s offshore leasing plans, which called for only three offshore oil and gas lease sales on federal waters from 2024 to 2029. That tally — prompted by concerns about wildlife habitat and carbon emissions — was a reduction from the roughly dozen or more issued per planning period in prior decades, according to numbers from Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
The most recent U.S. offshore oil and gas lease sale happened in 2023.
