Overview
- Interior and TotalEnergies, which signed the agreement Monday at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, will end two offshore wind leases in exchange for the company investing $928 million in U.S. oil, gas and LNG before receiving federal reimbursement.
- TotalEnergies plans to steer the money to the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas along with new production in the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. shale fields, and it pledged to forgo any new U.S. offshore wind projects.
- The terminated leases cover Attentive Energy in the New York Bight and Carolina Long Bay off North Carolina, both awarded in 2022, with a combined potential of about 4 gigawatts that developers said could power more than 1.3 million homes.
- The administration cast the move as bolstering reliability and lowering costs, while environmental groups and governors in New York and North Carolina called it a misuse of taxpayer funds that weakens clean-energy plans for a region facing tight power supplies.
- Energy lawyers said the payout may draw on the DOJ Judgment Fund, and other firms such as RWE have signaled they could seek similar refunds, a prospect that follows court defeats of earlier federal stop-work orders and raises broader fiscal and policy questions.