Wednesday, August 19, 2026
By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on June 16, 2025
On April 18, the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced “the first step in a robust public engagement process to develop a proposed schedule for offshore oil and gas lease sales on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).”
On April 29, the bureau opened a 45-day public comment period that will end at midnight on June 16. The public comment period is the first in a number of steps that, according to the April 18 press release, will replace “the current 10th Program (2024–2029)” that bans offshore exploration in the Atlantic waters off North Carolina and other southern states.
Although as required by law, BOEM announced the public comment period in the Federal Register, plans to replace the existing five-year plan appear to have caught government officials by surprise with a flurry of county, municipal and business resolutions opposing offshore exploration activity coming in the last week.
On June 9, the Dare County Commissioners unanimously passed a resolution opposing new offshore gas and leasing after a presentation from Health and Human Services Director Sheila Davies.
Asked by the Voice if she had been aware of the proposed changes to the current plan, Davies said, “We never heard from or received anything from BOEM about this…I was contacted by a representative from OCEANA [an international ocean conservation organization] who requested a meeting with me and other community leaders, which was held on May 13th.”
After the county passed its resolution, the towns of Southern Shores, Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head voiced their opposition to offshore exploration for oil and gas. Additionally the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce and the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau have also come out against changing the current rules. On June 16, the Currituck County Commissioners also weighed in against offshore energy exploration.
It would appear that those in local jurisdictions were not the only government officials caught off guard. As late as June 15, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein (D) and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) issued a bipartisan letter asking Kelly Hammerle. National Program Manager for BOEM, “to respect the wishes of our states and our coastal communities and…protect our coastlines and the industries they support.”
The current ban on offshore exploration appears to have bipartisan support. Alex Crane, spokesman for 3rd District Republican Congressman Greg Murphy told the Voice that Murphy was aware of the public comment period and “is opposed to drilling off the coast of North Carolina.”
But when asked by the Voice, State Senator Bobby Hanig responded that, “I don’t really have a comment on that issue.”
The public comment period is the first step in a process that may take up to two years. There are currently two bans in effect on offshore exploration for petroleum resources.
Much of the Southern OCS on the Southeastern Coast has been closed to exploration for gas and oil since 2020, when President Trump withdrew Florida, Georgia and South Carolina from exploration until 2032.
And before leaving office in 2025, President Biden permanently withdrew all East Coast OCS waters from exploration for gas and oil under a provision in the The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953.
The provision, Section 12(a), states that the President “may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands.” Section 12 (a) has been invoked before, most recently in 2016 when President Obama withdrew approximately 119 million acres of the Chukchi Sea and parts of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic.
BOEM and the Trump Administration are in court hoping to overturn the permanent ban according to Megan Huynh, Senior Attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
“The Trump Administration has sought to reverse Biden’s 12(a) withdrawal,” she said. “That is being challenged in court.”
Even if Biden’s action is overturned, it is unclear how much energy can be extracted from the state’s OCS. In the 1970s, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the predecessor to BOEM, leased the Manteo Prospect, located about 45 miles northeast of Cape Hatteras. Although it was considered at that time to have significant potential, it was also characterized as a “high-risk prospect,” according to a 1999 MMS document.
Tests run in the 1970s indicated there could potentially be either gas or oil available. If the restrictions on OCS use are lifted, the Manteo Prospect would be included in areas that gas and oil interests could lease to develop.
The “high-risk” is not spelled out in the document, but Braxton Davis, the Executive Director of the Coastal Federation points out the Manteo Prospect “has the highest concentration of diverse marine mammal assemblage, just about in the world.”
Davis, who was the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management (DCM) director before becoming the executive director of the Coastal Federation, recalled that when he was DCM Director, “The environmental impacts on marine mammals and fisheries of the seismic surveys alone were tremendous and harmful, to the point that the state ended up finding those proposals to be inconsistent with the state’s coastal policies.”
Davis also pointed out that ocean currents don’t necessarily obey state or political boundaries.
“A lot of times what can happen is surface spills can drift in unpredictable directions based on prevailing winds…There’s nothing to say that a spill [anywhere] could not end up on North Carolina shores,” he added.
SEE ALSO: Dare Commissioners unite in opposing offshore drilling
Comments
Kevin Conner
Dare County has got a helluva lot more pressing issues to solve than offshore oil drilling, which will not happen. Now on the other hand, you have a stagnant tourist industry and people who can’t afford to live here. So what’s more important, real problems for real people, or these chicken little problems that will be tied up in the courts for years to come. If your passion is to fight the oil industry, then knock yourself out, but for people who teach, fish, wait tables, man registers, manage front desks, tend bar, stock grocery shelves, frame houses, Uber and clean rental houses to name only a few, their concerns are far more immediate and I haven’t read of a single entity that has resolved the affordable housing crisis on the Outer Banks or offered sustainable employment with the type of wages necessary to live here, not a one.
Liz
@Kevin Conner
Thank you, and amen!
The workers you mention very often work one or two side jobs to get by. They don’t have the time or the luxury to fight offshore drilling, or demonstrate for or against “causes.”
ray meekins
Kevin,
There’s long range problems out there such as this issue, and there’s immediate, short range ones as you have stated. Both are important. You could be right, that offshore oil will never happen, but to hear you say it’s not even worth the time or effort to fight is overly pragmatic at best, given our government’s efforts, including Mr. Hannig, who apparently could care less, on the part of big oil (have you ever heard our leader opine about how ugly oil platforms are)? Not that you’re suggesting otherwise, but letting them set up shop off our coast is certainly not the answer to the issues you enumerate. And just think about how a single oil spill might affect those livelihoods.
B Johnson
Liz and Kevin,
You both make great points about the many issues we look to our elected representatives to provide guidance and solutions to – its a good thing that these issues are mutually exclusive and can all be addressed by using their time wisely. Sounds like the took a few moments to pass this resolution to let our opposition be known when they found out about this filing. Now they can get back to the other important issues! I don’t have any spare time to demonstrate either, but I’m very glad that those that do, make their voices heard for all of us.
Dare County has a Housing Task Force that issued a report in 2024, and this recent article about their efforts in Avon is an excellent read to show the complexity of addressing this issue, with competing interests on both sides! https://www.thecoastlandtimes.com/2024/10/30/cluster-housing-approved-for-avon/
Travis
Offshore drilling is an existential threat to the Outer Banks, made even more dangerous because if there was a spill, there’s no guarantee that the Feds would jump in and help with the economic impact or the clean up as they’ve done with spill disasters in the past. So your two jobs waiting tables, fishing, teaching or any other profession could be quite adversely impacted by allowing offshore drilling.
I get it: it’s the meteor 50 million miles from Earth that might hit us or might not hit us. It is hard to feel you can have any influence on what happens, certainly not to the hands-on Bruce Willis extent in Armageddon.
But with offshore drilling you do have a the ability to influence the outcome with your voice and your vote. If you’re in the Drill Baby Drill crowd, whatever. Nothing will change your mind. But if you are just feeling a little powerless or ambivalent about the issue, I hope you’ll find the spark of passion you need to use your voice and your vote to oppose offshore drilling.
Sandflea
“ If your passion is to fight the oil industry, then knock yourself out, but for people who teach, fish, wait tables, man registers, manage front desks, tend bar, stock grocery shelves, frame houses, Uber and clean rental houses to name only a few, their concerns are far more immediate and I haven’t read of a single entity that has resolved the affordable housing crisis on the Outer Banks or offered sustainable employment with the type of wages necessary to live here, not a one.”
This is one helluva sentence!
Kittyhawer
https://www.umces.edu/wind-energy#:~:text=Impact%20of%20offshore%20wind%20developments%20on%20marine%20life&text=The%20sound%20levels%20from%20pile,species%2C%20such%20as%20endangered%20whales.
We need to be more concerned with the Offshore Wind Turbine Farm which is actually going to happen here. This environmental monstrosity is breathing down our necks…
Freenusa
Kittyhawker you are spot on regarding wind turbines in the ocean, these areas will be future ocean junkyards. They had to close Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard beaches, not too many months ago, because shards of fiberglass washing up on the beaches, from delaminating fiberglass from the massive propeller blades. Such a massive waste of $$$$$$.
I thought I had read a while the “Kitty Hawk Wind Farm”, off the VA/NC coast had been nixed.
Koo Flocks
Lft the bans and let the private sector locate abundant sources of gas and oil. Drill baby, Drill!!!!!