The Interior Department announced plans Friday to walk back changes under former President Joe Biden that raised bonding requirements for offshore oil and gas projects.
The move, if completed, would ease financial obligations for some oil and gas operators while potentially transferring costs to taxpayers and increasing the risk that the U.S. government would pay to decommission drilling rigs.
Interior said Friday that a rule implemented in 2024 to impose supplemental financial bond requirements on offshore drilling companies in shaky financial shape had made it more difficult for operators to develop in the Gulf of Mexico, which President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of America earlier this year.
Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees offshore oil leasing, previously estimated that the 2024 rule — the first such overhaul in the past 20 years — would raise an additional $6.9 billion in financial assurances from the industry. The assurances are bonds set aside for the government to tap in case companies go bankrupt or are otherwise unable to pay decommissioning costs.
