Gulf of Mexico

US Auctions Giant Stretch Of Gulf Of Mexico For Oil And Gas Drilling

March 31, 2023 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, Ecowatch. Educate! Drilling, Energy, Environment, Gulf of Mexico, Oil and Gas

The U.S. held its first auction of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico in more than a year on Wednesday. The sale — mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — garnered $264 million in offers from oil companies, including BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil. The auction in federal waters came just two weeks following the Biden administration’s approval of the Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s environmentally sensitive North Slope. Environmental groups — who have challenged the lease sale in federal court — were not pleased with President Joe Biden going back on a campaign promise to stop the extraction of fossil fuels on federal lands.

Louisiana Boat Parade Protests Fracked Gas Summit

November 3, 2022 Naomi Yoder, Medium.com. Resist! Fracked Gas, Gulf of Mexico, health, LNG

At lunchtime, the boats started arriving just off the water of the Golden Nugget, the conference venue. Then more boats — there were, in the end, at least 17 vessels on the water protesting pollution and the intrusion of gas exports into communities and ecosystems. The vessels circled the water and displayed banners. There were shrimpers, oystermen and activists all on the water. The chatter onshore was myopic. “I bet they’re using gasoline in their boats!” The point isn’t the fact that we can’t avoid that we still have fossil fuels in use everywhere in our lives. The point is that we need to transition AWAY from fossil fuels, not toward them as the LNG industry is pushing for.

Judge Annuls Gulf Of Mexico Oil Auction Over Climate Impact

January 28, 2022 Valerie Volcovici And Nichola Groom, Reuters. Educate! climate crisis, Drilling, Gulf of Mexico, Joe Biden, Legal System, Oil and Gas

A federal judge invalidated the results of an oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday saying the Biden administration failed to properly account for the auction's climate change impact. The decision has cast uncertainty over the future of the U.S. federal offshore drilling program, which has been a big source of public revenue for decades but also drawn the ire of activists concerned about its impact on the environment and contribution to global warming. The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 15% of existing U.S. oil production and 5% of dry natural gas output, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the decision, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court of the District of Columbia ruled to vacate the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's Lease Sale 257, which offered about 80 million offshore acres (37.4 million hectares) in the Gulf of Mexico in an auction last November.

EPA Plan For Unlimited Dumping of Fracking Wastewater In The Gulf

September 25, 2016 Mike Ludwig, www.truth-out.org Resist! Fracking, Gulf of Mexico, Water

By Mike Ludwig for Truthout. Environmentalists are warning the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that its draft plan to continue allowing oil and gas companies to dump unlimited amounts of fracking chemicals and wastewater directly into the Gulf of Mexico is in violation of federal law. In a letter sent to EPA officials on Monday, attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity warned that the agency's draft permit for water pollution discharges in the Gulf fails to properly consider how dumping wastewater containing chemicals from fracking and acidizing operations would impact water quality and marine wildlife. The attorneys claim that regulators do not fully understand how the chemicals used in offshore fracking and other well treatments -- some of which are toxic and dangerous to human and marine life -- can impact marine environments, and crucial parts of the draft permit are based on severely outdated data. Finalizing the draft permit as it stands would be a violation of the Clean Water Act, they argue.

Obama Admin Approved Over 1,500 Offshore Fracking Permits

July 2, 2016 Steve Horn, www.desmogblog.com Educate! Barack Obama, Fracking, Gulf of Mexico

By Steve Horn for Desmog - On June 24, the independent news website TruthOut broke a doozy of a story: the Obama Administration hassecretly approved over 1,500 instances of offshore hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the Gulf of Mexico, including during the Deepwater Horizon offshore spill disaster. Albeit released on a Friday, a day where many mainstream media reporters head out of the office early and venture to late-afternoon and early-evening Happy Hour specials at the bars, the TruthOut story has received deafening silence by the corporate-owned media apparatus.

TransCanada Wins Bid For Underwater Gas Pipeline Across Gulf Of Mexico

June 17, 2016 Steve Horn, www.desmogblog.com Educate! Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, Pipelines, TransCanada

By Steve Horn for Desmog - TransCanada, owner of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline currently being contested in federal court and in front of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) legal panel, has won a $2.1 billion joint venture bid with Sempra Energy for a pipeline to shuttle gas obtained from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in Texas' Eagle Ford Shale basin across the Gulf of Mexico and into Mexico. The 500-mile long Sur de Texas-Tuxpan pipeline, as reported on previously by DeSmog, is part of an extensive pipeline empire TransCanada is building from the U.S. to Mexico.

Gulf Coast Activist At Shell Meeting Decries Destruction Of Home

May 26, 2016 Deirdre Fulton, www.commondreams.org Resist! Gulf of Mexico, Oil Spill, shell

By Deirdre Fulton for Common Dreams - Just two weeks after Royal Dutch Shell's offshore drilling operations released nearly 90,000 gallons of oil into the water off the Louisiana coast, an Indigenous activist from the Gulf region spoke out at Shell's annual shareholders meeting in the Netherlands on Tuesday, highlighting the company's history of environmental devastation in the place she calls home. "In the late 90s, after learning that their community was plagued by an open-air, toxic, oil-field waste facility...

Wake Of Shell’s Gulf Oil Spill, Protesters Demand Ban

May 18, 2016 Mike Ludwig, www.truth-out.org Resist! Gulf of Mexico, Offshore Drilling, Oil Spill, shell

By Mike Ludwig for Truthout - As Shell Oil and the US Coast Guard continued to clean up a large oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, about 1,300 protesters from across North America marched in Washington, DC, to protest the Obama administration's offshore drilling plan. Lindsay Meiman, an organizer with the climate justice group 350.org, said the spill "reinvigorated the sense of urgency to ban offshore drilling" already felt by the frontline communities in the Gulf and Arctic regions that sent activists to lead the protest.

Shell Spills 90,000 Gallons Of Oil Into Gulf Of Mexico

May 14, 2016 Ryan Schleeter, www.greenpeace.org Educate! Gulf of Mexico, Oil & Gas, shell

By Ryan Schleeter for Greene Peace - Just weeks after commemorating the six-year anniversary of the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon blowout, the Gulf of Mexico is once again the site of a major oil spill. Yesterday evening, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) reported a 36-square-mile oil sheen visible about 97 miles off the Louisiana coast near Shell’s Brutus platform. As of this morning, no injuries had been reported.

A New Lease On Life For The Gulf

March 25, 2016 Drew Hudson, www.environmental-action.org Resist! Environment, Fossil Fuels, Gulf of Mexico

By Drew Hudson for Environmental Action - Yesterday was a turning point in our movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground. For the first time ever, we shut down an auction of Fossil Fuels on public lands – in this case under the Gulf of Mexico – and sent a powerful message to the Obama administration and Big Oil companies everywhere that to stop global warming we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and finance a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 (or sooner).

Louisiana Tribe Now Officially Community Of Climate Refugees

February 14, 2016 Chris DAngelo, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Climate Change, Gulf of Mexico, Indigenous Rights, Refugees

By Chris DAngelo for Huffington Post. Isle de Jean Charles, LA - Deep in the bayous of Louisiana, about 80 miles southwest of New Orleans, lies the Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny swath of land that's all but vanished into the Gulf of Mexico. Over the last half-century or so, the island has fallen victim to irresponsible oil and gas extraction practices and the effects of climate change. Many of its residents -- members of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans -- have been forced to flee. "What you see of the island now is just a skeleton of what it used to be," Chris Brunet, a tribal council member and lifelong island resident, told The New York Times in a mini-documentary called Vanishing Island in 2014.

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