Senate energy panel leaders from both parties press for Gulf oil lease sale to go on, despite ruling

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Democratic and Republican leaders of the U.S. Senate’s energy committee are pressing President Joe Biden’s administration to forge ahead with a sale of Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases Nov. 8, even though a court order that it do so has been paused.

The lease sale, called for in 2022 climate legislation dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, was announced earlier this year and was originally scheduled for Sept. 27. But the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced in August that it was scaling back the amount of acreage that oil companies would be allowed to bid on from 73 million acres (30 million hectares) to 67 million acres (27 million hectares). That followed a proposed legal settlement between the administration and environmentalists in a lawsuit over protections for an endangered whale species.

Oil companies and the state of Louisiana objected to the reduced acreage and filed suit. A federal judge in southwest Louisiana ordered the sale to go on at its original scale with the whale protections eliminated. That led to an appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In late September, a panel of that court refused to block the federal judge’s order but amended it to push the sale back to Nov. 8, so the administration would have more time to prepare. But on Thursday, a different panel stayed that order and set a hearing on the merits of the case for Nov. 13.

It remained unclear Friday whether BOEM would again delay the sale until after the Nov. 13 hearing, hold the sale of the full 73 million acres as originally planned or seek to hold the scaled-back sale. The notice of the Nov. 8 sale was still on the BOEM website Friday evening. An agency spokesman would only say that lawyers were reviewing Thursday’s ruling.

Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the energy committee, said the Nov. 8 sale should go on. “There is no reason to consider more last-minute changes and unnecessary delays,” Barrasso said in a statement Friday.

That followed a Thursday night statement from the committee chairman, Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key player in the passage of the climate bill but a frequent critic of the Biden administration’s energy policies. Manchin called the Biden administration’s handling of the lease sale “a complete mess.” He said the sale should go on even if the government has to withdraw from the whale protection settlement.