"A draft rule could land in January, the outgoing administration’s last gasp bid to reshape the offshore fossil fuel program."
"The Biden administration promised to release a new standard for ocean drilling that could help clean up a growing number of old oil and gas wells, but the first-of-a-kind rule has yet to arrive with just two months before President-elect Donald Trump reenters the White House.
The fitness to operate standard — intended to weed out companies unable to cover cleanup costs or guilty of safety and environmental infractions — carries huge implications if it’s not rewritten or indefinitely delayed by the Trump administration.
A draft rule could land in January as the last major effort of the Biden administration to reshape the nation’s offshore fossil fuel program, in lieu of retiring the program, as President Joe Biden promised during his 2020 presidential campaign. If finalized, the standard could block so-called bad actor companies from buying new drilling leases offshore, giving federal regulators an added way to pressure companies to improve their compliance records and decommission their old wells, pipelines and platforms."
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