The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow new oil and gas drilling across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, including a remote region off Alaska in the high Arctic where drilling has never before taken place.
The plan is one of President Trump’s most significant steps yet to increase the production of fossil fuels, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.
It comes at the same time that dozens of countries have been calling for a phaseout of oil, gas and coal at the United Nations climate conference in Belém, Brazil, an event that the United States is skipping this year.
Under the proposal, made public on Thursday, the Interior Department would hold seven lease sales through 2031 for the Gulf of Mexico, which Mr. Trump calls the Gulf of America. The agency would also auction drilling rights off the California coast for the first time in roughly four decades, teeing up a clash with Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has promised to block oil drilling there and has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s chief adversaries.
In a notable omission, the plan would not allow drilling in areas of the Atlantic Ocean off Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, Republican-led states where leaders worry about possible oil spills and want to block drilling along their coasts. Fishing and tourism industries along the Gulf Coast were devastated by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig disaster that killed 11 people and spilled millions of gallons of oil.
The plan calls for the government to hold 21 sales through 2031 for leases off the coast of Alaska, including in an isolated region stretching more than 200 miles offshore in the Arctic Ocean that is home to polar bears, bowhead whales, ice seals, walruses and other wildlife.
No company has ever drilled for oil in the icy High Arctic, as the area is known. It is unclear whether any would be interested in doing so, given the severe weather conditions and the lack of existing infrastructure.
The move reverses the stance taken by the Biden administration, which held the smallest number of oil and gas lease sales in U.S. history, part of its effort to reduce future fossil fuel production to address climate change.
Mr. Trump’s tax and spending law, enacted in July, mandated at least 36 oil and gas lease sales in federal waters, including 30 in the Gulf and six in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act also requires the government to update a plan for offshore leases every five years.
“The Biden administration slammed the brakes on offshore oil and gas leasing and crippled the long-term pipeline of America’s offshore production,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. “By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong.”
Oil industry leaders embraced the plan, noting that drilling generates billions of dollars in annual tax revenue for the federal government as well as state and local governments. “After years of delay, the announcement today is a huge step forward,” said Dustin Meyer, the senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. oil industry’s main trade organization.
Environmentalists said more drilling would unleash more greenhouse gases. Scientists say the world needs to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible in order to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.
“An offshore lease issued next year could keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere for the next 40 years,” said Rebecca Loomis, a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “This isn’t about next summer’s emissions, it’s about locking in a half-century of climate-wrecking pollution that will drive even more extreme heat and storms for future generations,” Ms. Loomis said.
Soon after taking office in 2021, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. paused new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters as part of his climate agenda. After a federal judge blocked the pause, the Biden administration proposed the smallest offshore leasing plan in history, with just three lease sales scheduled in the Gulf through 2029.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the Interior Department initially proposed to open nearly all U.S. coastal waters to drilling. But in response to requests from Republicans in the Southeast, the agency reversed course and announced a moratorium on drilling off Florida, Georgia and South Carolina through 2032.
At the U.N. climate conference in Brazil on Thursday, Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former lead climate negotiator, put her head in her hands when she learned about the drilling plan in the United States. “You have poorer countries here having a conversation about how to diversify their economies away from exploring fossil fuels,” Ms. Morgan said, “and you have the wealthiest country continuing to double down.”
The Interior Department will solicit public comments on the five-year drilling plan before finalizing it, which could take up to two years. In the meantime, the agency is scheduled to auction off drilling rights across 80 million acres in the Gulf on Dec. 10.
Additional lease sales in the Gulf and Alaska’s Cook Inlet are planned for March. These auctions were required by Mr. Trump’s tax and spending law, not the new drilling plan.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
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