As the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management works to set the stage for the next oil and gas leasing round to be held for offshore acreage in the Gulf of America, formerly the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GoM), the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is on a quest to fulfill the Trump administration’s energy dominance dreams by laying the groundwork to revise the scaled-back oil and gas leasing program, which comes with only three lease sales up to 2029, as a legacy of the previous administration’s zest to turbocharge clean energy development.

After the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) forbade BOEM from issuing a lease for offshore wind development unless the agency had put up at least 60 million acres for oil and gas leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the previous year, the Department of the Interior published the ‘ 2024-2029 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program ’ in December 2023.