The US Administration has decided to remove 625 million acres (i.e., over 2.5 million km2) of US oceans from potential oil and gas drilling, aiming to protect coastal communities, marine ecosystems, and local economies from oil spills and other impacts of offshore drilling. The planned executive order will invoke the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to prohibit the sale of new oil and gas leases along the Atlantic coast, the Pacific coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of the northern Bering Sea in the US state of Alaska. The withdrawals would have no expiration date.
There is no active oil and gas exploration and development along the eastern US Atlantic or in the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area, while there are approximately 30 decades-old existing leases offshore southern California, and approximately a dozen in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. Nothing in the withdrawals affects rights under existing leases.
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