Environmentalists are pressuring the Biden Administration to halt permitting for planned crude oil export facilities after successfully lobbying for a temporary suspension of LNG export project approvals.
The Biden Administration should re-evaluate the approval process and halt issuing permits to deepwater oil export facilities, campaign groups led by Sierra Club said in a letter to the Department of Transportation and the White House.
The climate activists sent the letter a month after the United States Maritime Administration (MARAD) issued the deepwater port license for the Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT) to Enterprise Products Partners. The SPOT offshore platform is planned to be located approximately 30 nautical miles off Brazoria County, Texas, in 115 feet of water, and is designed to load very large crude carriers (VLCCs) and other crude oil tankers up to a rate of 85,000 barrels per hour.
The U.S. currently has only one operational offshore export port capable of handling VLCCs, or supertankers, which have the capacity to load and ship 2 million barrels of crude oil. This is the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), which handles mostly crude produced in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Texas offshore ports for supertankers are planned to be able to export crude from the top oil-producing basin in the United States, the Permian.
But environmentalists are having none of this.
“Up to this point, DOT has failed to meaningfully evaluate the wide-ranging harms of licensing massive deepwater crude export facilities in the Gulf of Mexico and the significant upstream production and global consumption the projects would induce,” Devorah Ancel, a senior attorney with the Sierra Club, said in a press release.
“Just like with liquefied gas exports, these projects pose serious threats to the climate, vulnerable communities and ecosystems, public health, and national security,” Ancel added.
At the time of the Sea Port Oil Terminal approval last month, Erin Gaines, Senior Attorney at Earthjustice, said “We are disappointed in this decision to greenlight unprecedented oil exports that are clearly not in the public interest.”
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
