Perhaps the wind industry’s problems are more fundamental than those presented by US policies. Why else would TotalEnergies, the company that jumped at the chance to annul its costly romance with US offshore wind, be looking for a way out of its German commitments?
NDR / Süddeutsche Zeitung: TotalEnergies is seeking to quit a major offshore wind energy project in Germany for which it offered to pay six billion euros in a 2023 state auction, arguing that slow grid connections and a deteriorating economic environment have triggered the decision.
According to the reports, energy company BP, which also won a successful multi-billion euro bid in 2023, could seek a similar opt-out. After transferring its offshore wind activities into a subsidiary in 2025, the new company is said to be scaling back and ultimately planning to shut down its offices in Berlin and Hamburg.
Does this sound familiar?The mood in Germany’s offshore wind industry and elsewhere in Europe has shifted markedly in recent years. While bidders in offshore auctions in 2023 were ready to pay billions of euros for the right to implement new projects, a subsequent auction round in 2025 failed to attract a single bid. According to offshore wind industry association BWO, the meager expansion of less than 1 GW annually since 2020 was mainly triggered by a spike in investment and capital costs.
Environmental NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH, not the best acronym in English 😉) called the result a “quantum leap” for offshore wind energy. “Wind power at sea is now so economically attractive that project developers are outbidding each other for access to marine areas,” said DUH executive director Sascha Müller-Kraenner. “The fairy tale of expensive green electricity is thus finally off the table.” (This quote didn’t age well!)
“The sums are obscene,” an industry source, who was part of a non-successful bid, told business daily Handelsblatt. (Irrational bidding similar to what we saw during the 2022 U.S. Atlantic Wind Sale.)
A New York Times article suggests that the consolidation of BOEM and BSEE into the Marine Minerals Administration will weaken environmental oversight. It will not. On the contrary, regulation is likely to be strengthened as resources shift from inter-bureau coordination and redundancy management to the primary safety and environmental protection missions.
Given the challenges associated with Federal reorganizations, agency heads often opt for the status quo. I’m pleased that the current DOI leadership team, with whom I disagree on some issues, chose to merge the bureaus.
Quotes from the NYT article followed by my comments:
NYT:The Trump administration is creating a new office that critics say could weaken the environmental oversight of oil drilling and seabed mining in territorial waters.
Comment: The functional overlap and associated uncertainty that permeates the offshore regulatory regime is a weakness, not a strength. Virtually every element of the regulatory program requires coordination between the two bureaus. This includes plan and permit approvals, decommissioning and financial assurance, spill response plans, lease stipulations, assignments, pipeline regulation, environmental reviews, enforcement actions, and geologic data collection and review. Note the list of MOUs that are intended to coordinate BOEM and BSEE redundancy. The documents often do more to confuse than clarify. For example, see the MOU entitled “Environmental and NEPA.”
Multi-bureau organizational complexity is not in the best interest of safety and environmental protection. Overlapping responsibilities, coordination challenges, and “turf” issues distract the technical staff from their important risk management duties, the work they are good at and enjoy doing. BSEE and BOEM should be overseeing the offshore industry, not each other.
NYT:The new agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, will be formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in an effort to increase environmental oversight of the energy industry and prevent future oil disasters. After the split, the Interior Department’s oil-leasing activities were separated from environmental regulation and financial management. (emphasis added)
Comment: The assertion that the leasing and environmental regulation were separated is false. The leasing bureau (BOEM) was assigned lead responsibility for the review and approval of the fundamental operational planning documents – Exploration Plans, Development and Production Plans, and Development Operations Coordination Documents. This includes the environmental reviews pursuant to NEPA.
NYT:The move is “worrisome because it has the potential of bringing things back where they were, where there was this inherent conflict of interest between promotion of offshore oil and gas, and oversight safety,” according to Donald Boesch, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
“In recent years various bodies have concluded that certain MMS offices and programs have violated ethical rules or guidelines. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, some questioned whether ethical lapses played any role in causing the blowout. The Chief Counsel‘s team found no evidence of any such lapses.“
NYT:The new bureau will also take on oversight of the Trump administration’s plans to lease waters in U.S. territories to deep-sea mining companies. The first of these sales, according to the spokeswoman for the Interior Department, are likely to happen next year.
Comment: DOI’s marine minerals program is decades old and is a priority for the current administration. Reorganization should not affect the MMA’s capability to oversee these activities.
TotalEnergies commits to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States.
Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind.
Specifically, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, in the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas;
The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production.
Following theseTotal investments, the U.S. will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company:
Lease No. OCS-A 0535 (now 0545). The lease is located in Carolina Long Bay area. This lease was fully executed by TotalEnergies Renewables USA, LLC on June 1, 2022, after payment of $133,333,333.
Lease No. OCS-A 0538. The lease is located in the New York Bight area. The lease was fully executed by Attentive Energy, LLC on May 1, 2022, after payment of $795,000,000.
Total pledges not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States.
Sen. Mike Lee has introduced legislation to repeal the Jones Act, which is drawing additional scrutiny for the increased cost of transporting US oil production and LNG to US ports.
Because facilities on the Outer Continental Shelf are US ports under the Jones Act, the Act has been problematic for both the offshore oil and wind industries. The attached Customs and Border Patrol document delves into the nuances of Jones Act compliance for lifting operations (p.14-15) and “points” on the OCS (p.17).
EXAMPLE: CBP interprets the OCSLA to extend the Jones Act to artificial islands and similar structures, as well as to mobile oil drilling rigs, drilling platforms, and other devices attached to the seabed of the OCS for the purpose of resource extraction and/or exploration operations. Such objects located on the OCS are considered points or places in the United States for purposes of the Jones Act. Similarly, floating warehouse vessels, when anchored on the OCS to supply drilling rigs on the OCS, are also coastwise points.
Check out this complex CBP ruling on the transportation of well fluids from one location in a subsea well cluster to another. See if you understand and agree with their conclusion (below).
The transportation of fluids as described in the FACTS section above, by a dynamically-positioned, foreign-flagged drill ship between wells located within an IF (integrated facility), which subsequently, transships the fluids to a coastwise qualified barge for transportation to a coastwise point, violates 46 U.S.C. § 55102.
On a related matter, it’s still unclear to me whether the attachment of the lower marine riser package to a subsea wellhead makes a floating, dynamically positioned drillship a US port under the Jones Act.
Per PHYS.ORG: Researchers at the Helmholtz Center Hereon have analyzed the long-term overall impact of this large number of wind farms on the hydrodynamics of the North Sea for the first time. They found that the current pattern could change on a large scale.
The peer reviewed German study is attached. Excerpt:
The near- and far-field wake effects affect vertical mixing and surface heat fluxes – primarily driven by large-scale wind stress reductions – leading to shallower mixed layers and long-term surface warming of up to 0.2 deg. C in wind farm areas. Our findings reveal a basin-scale physical footprint of offshore wind energy and highlight the need to account r hydrodynamic impacts in future offshore wind farm planning.
Updatedincident tables for OCS oil and gas operations. The most recent data are for 2023! Providing timely details on incidents is a fundamental responsibility of a safety regulator.
A summary of incidents associated with the OCS wind program. From press reports, we know about the fatality during Empire Wind construction. What other incidents have occurred to date?
Information on the mysterious sinking of the Aban Pearl semi-submersiblein May 2010. An investigation was conducted, but the report was never shared. In the interest of offshore safety, the new regime in Venezuela should release this report.
Judge Patti Saris vacated part 2 of Trump’s 1/20/2025 “Wind Memo.”Part 1, which withdrew all OCS lands from wind leasing, was not in dispute. Part 2 suspended issuing wind energy permits and other authorizations.
The judge ruled (full order attached) that the suspension of wind permitting violates Administrative Procedures Act provisions requiring agencies “to proceed within a reasonable time and to set and complete proceedings expeditiously.”
She concluded further that “the moratorium halts all wind energy authorizations indefinitely, pending a comprehensive assessment with no timeline, which is inconsistent with statutory deadlines and general commands for prompt processing in laws like OCSLA, the Clean Water Act, and others governing wind projects.”
Although the judge’s assessment of the permitting moratorium seems sound, the merits of offshore wind as a primary energy source remain very much in doubt.
Member companies, which include major players such as Ørsted, Equinor, Vattenfall, RWE, and CIP, report quarterly data on accidents, near-misses, hazardous observations, and equipment damage. As is the case with most industry reporting schemes, anonymity is prioritized over transparency.
Sørensen asserts that the G+ wind industry data are incomplete: ”It shows that what is reported under the guidelines has gone down, and also that there is a cut off on what is being reported that does not include the full value chain on the industry.” He notes that a contractor to Northland Power from Canada, a member of G+, was involved in a 2024 workplace accident in Taiwan that resulted in three fatalities. (It’s also noteworthy that Equinor’s 2024 Empire Wind fatality was not included.)
Sørensen: ”There have been no significant improvements in the last 10 years. Safety in offshore wind is neither getting worse nor better. There are no signs of that.”
”I’m speaking up because we owe people the truth. If we’re not honest about the actual safety conditions in offshore wind, we can’t change them. Misinformation about workplace safety creates a dangerous illusion that everything is “under control”, while too many people are getting hurt. But when we dare to speak about reality as it is, we create the foundation for a safer, faster, and truly sustainable energy transition,” Sørensen says.
”And then it becomes difficult to learn if you have to wait for something to go through 57 gates and down past legal,” he says. (Sound familiar?)
Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE) 