The Biden administration gave oil industry lobbyists and representatives a regular audience in 2021 to discuss a key regulatory change that is shaping up to work in the interest of major oil companies, while hammering the industry’s major players as profiteers harming the environment, according to emails obtained by the Functional Government Initiative (FGI).
The communications between officials from the Department of the Interior (DOI), Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), American Petroleum Institute (API) and major oil companies occurred primarily in 2021, and pertained to federal rules for decommissioning offshore drilling areas.
BOEM later published a new proposal to change those rules on June 29 of this year, which would create a revised system for companies to set aside funds for lease area clean-up that some observers say shields the world’s biggest oil producers from billions in potential liability for decommissioning costs.