The Interior Department has unveiled settlement agreements with TotalEnergies to cancel two offshore wind leases in New York and North Carolina, providing the most detailed information to date on the federal government’s rationale for offering nearly $1 billion to cancel the projects.
The Trump administration has touted the agreement as an economic win, stating the French company had agreed to forgo any new offshore wind projects in the United States and would instead use its returned investment to develop liquefied natural gas in the Gulf Coast. Democratic lawmakers have called for more detailed information on the agreements, warning they are likely illegal.
Settlement documents for the New York Bight and Carolina Long Bay leases published Friday said Total would invest $133 million in returned funds from the North Carolina project and $795 million from the New York project into oil and gas production, LNG development, or “non-renewable based electricity” generation or transmission. Those investments could include expenditures the company made prior to the settlement.
“The terms of the deal are terrible for the American taxpayer, the entity that [Interior] is supposed to represent, given that we lose $1 billion dollars in exchange for work Total was clearly already doing anyway,” said Liz Klein, who led Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management during the Biden administration, in an email following publication of the settlement agreements. “The communities that were depending on those leases being developed with a cleaner, domestic source of energy will also lose out in the form of higher and higher energy prices, thanks to this administration.”
