March 23 (UPI) — The Trump administration closed a deal with the French energy company TotalEnergies to pay it nearly $1 billion to end construction of wind farms off the shores of New York and North Carolina.
TotalEnergies will be paid $928 million after it invests the same amount of money in oil, natural gas and liquefied natural gas production in the United States, the Department of the Interior announced on Monday.
The company also pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States “in light of national security concerns,” the DOI said.
“Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release.
“We welcome TotalEnergies’ commitment to developing projects that produce dependable, affordable power to lower Americans’ monthly bills while providing secure U.S. base load power today — and in the future,” he said.
President Donald Trump has long criticized wind-generated energy, and his administration has made a series of moves over the last year to eliminate wind farms and redirect energy investment toward fossil fuel production.
TotalEnergies said in a press release that it is relinquishing its Carolina Long Bay lease and its New York Bight lease, which were awarded by the Biden administration in 2022, after studies showed that, unlike in Europe, offshore wind development in the United States is costly and could increase energy costs for U.S. consumers.
Both wind farms were still in the planning stages and had not yet been fully permitted, at least partially because DOI last year stopped issuing permits for renewable energy projects, The Washington Post reported.
In addition to recently signing a letter of intent with the lead developer of an LNG project in Alaska, TotalEnergies said it plans to reinvest the refunded offshore wind farm lease fees to finance construction of its Mt. Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas.
“These investments will contribute to supplying Europe with much-needed LNG from the United States and provide gas for U.S. data center development,” Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of the company, said in the release.
TotalEnergies already is the leading exporter of LNG from the United States, it said, with 19 million tons of gas exported last year. The Alaska project is expected to add about 2 million tons per year over the next 20 years.
Burgum announced the deal Monday at an energy conference in Houston, where The New York Times reported that he said “the era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over.”
For his part, Pouyanne said at the conference that the company made a “pragmatic” business decision based on the Trump administration’s energy policy.
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