Liam Denning, Columnist

Chill, Baby, Chill: Biden’s Offshore Oil Ban Is Just Politics

Companies have little interest in drilling in federal waters. Fighting over the issue can still be useful in Washington.

January 8, 2025 at 11:30 AM UTC

By Liam Denning

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Drill, baby, chill.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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If an oilfield out in the middle of the sea that was never going to be drilled gets banned by a lame-duck president, would anyone care? Congress might.

President Joe Biden kicked off his last fortnight in office by indefinitely blocking oil and gas development across 625 million acres of federal waters off the East, West and Gulf coasts as well as off Alaska. These account for about 40% of the estimated undiscovered economically recoverable oil and gas resources on the US outer continental shelf, according to ClearView Energy Partners, an analysis firm, citing a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management assessment published in 2021. That’s about 14.2 billion barrels of potential oil equivalent, with around 90% of that believed to be oil. If proven to actually be there, this would boost US proved reserves by about 10%.