Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times,
A global energy corporation based in France has ceded leases off North Carolina and New York where it planned to spend nearly $1 billion to build offshore wind turbines back to the U.S. Department of Interior and will instead redirect that investment into natural gas projects in Texas.
The “landmark agreement” was jointly announced by the department and TotalEnergies in Washington on March 23, and confirmed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné during a press conference at the 44th annual CERAWeek by S&P Global conference at the Americas Hilton-Houston.
Burgum said much of TotalEnergies’ offshore wind investments were tied to Biden-era “green energy” subsidies rather than in direct power generation, forcing American taxpayers “to pay for energy sources twice. They were paying for it in terms of high utility bills, but they were all paying for it in terms of the taxpayer subsidies.”
Under the agreement, he said, the department will reimburse TotalEnergies “dollar for dollar” for the $928 million it spent on securing the leases, much of that placed in bonds required to develop federal lands, in exchange for the company agreeing to reinvest that money into a Texas LNG project it was already developing.
The vacated offshore leases were acquired in 2022.
They are in the Carolina Long Bay area off North Carolina and in New York Bight off Long Island.
“With this agreement, we’re allowing this great company to redirect those dollars to affordable, reliable, and secure oil and natural gas production in the U.S.,” Burgum said.
Pouyanné said offshore wind development in the United States, “unlike those in Europe,” is costly and “might have a negative impact on power affordability” for the electrical customers they were designed to serve. “TotalEnergies considers there is no need to allocate capital to this technology in the U.S.,” he said.
The abundance of natural gas and domestic producers’ growing capacity to liquify natural gas for transport by ship is “a more affordable way” to generate energy in the United States, he said.
TotalEnergies will invest the reimbursed offshore lease money into the Rio Grande LNG project in Brownsville, Texas. The century-old company, which began drilling oil in Iraq in 1927, is among the project’s three major investors.
“These investments will contribute to supplying Europe with much-needed LNG from the U.S. and provide gas for U.S. data center development,” Pouyanné said. “We believe this is a more efficient use of capital in the United States.”