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Despite a push by the oil and gas industry to use the Russian invasion of Ukraine to justify increased drilling in the U.S., a wildly successful lease sale of offshore wind rights shows where America's energy future lies.
The American Petroleum Institute was ridiculed on Twitter after it suggested offering more oil and gas leases and permits on public lands and waters, but API's talking points were picked up verbatim by several members of Congress.
As finance professor Kathy Hipple pointed out to the New York Times API's demands don't make any long-term sense. “Does anyone want to continue to be dependent on oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Canada’s oil, a handful of private companies in the United States?” Hipple said. “To my mind, that’s not resilient.”
Even as API tried to make its case for oil drilling into the future, the Interior Department brought in more than $4 billion from the sale of six wind energy leases off the coast of New York and New Jersey on Friday. That's more than 22 times larger than oil companies paid for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico last November, in an auction that was later thrown out by a federal judge.
The wildly successful offshore wind sale is expected to produce enough electricity to power 2 million homes by the end of the decade. The Biden administration says it plans to hold six more offshore wind lease sales by 2025.
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It’s pretty rich for the oil and gas industry to talk about how reliable fossil fuels are when any big storm that happens, any time a war pops up, their reliability is thrown into question. Wars aren’t fought over solar energy. You don’t see these huge price spikes in clean energy.”
