But here’s the hitch: Interior and TotalEnergies don’t appear to be settling any active litigation, even though the company referred to “settlement agreements” in announcing the arrangement.
Pouyanné said his company approached Interior first to avoid the possibility of a legal battle. The proposal was clearly appealing to the Trump administration, which has been on a losing streak in U.S. courts over its efforts to block construction of five wind farms on the East Coast. Developers have sued Interior in response to its December stop-work order, which companies said cost them millions of dollars a day.
Three of those projects — Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Revolution Wind, and Vineyard Wind — are now delivering electricity to the region’s stressed-out grids. The other two, Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, are slated to start producing power later this year.
One of the broader, unanswered legal questions is whether using the Judgment Fund “is appropriate when you have an agreed-upon settlement” like the one with TotalEnergies, said Seth Kaplan, a vice president at Grid Strategies who previously worked in the offshore wind industry.
He and other experts said Interior’s deal brings to mind the “sue and settle” agreements that Republicans frequently blasted during the Democratic administrations of former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Those critics accused federal agencies of unethically striking deals with national environmental groups over things like air-quality standards and wildlife protections, all while going through the motions of a lawsuit to enact policy that otherwise would require congressional approval.
“That appears to be what is actually occurring here,” said Tony Irish, a former attorney in Interior’s Office of the Solicitor, who left the agency last year. He said the deal seems to be “a backdoor transaction” — one that’s intended to pursue the Trump administration’s policy goals of hampering renewable energy while boosting fossil fuels.
TotalEnergies’ pledge to spend its reimbursed lease fees on U.S. oil and gas projects is another confounding twist in the announcement. Irish said there doesn’t appear to be any legal basis for requiring a company to spend its settlement money in a particular way in exchange for receiving those dollars.
And while Burgum indicated that TotalEnergies would be investing in new fossil-fuel infrastructure, the lease funds will likely just offset its existing investments, Grist reports. The energy company is spending billions of dollars to build offshore oil platforms along the Gulf Coast, and last year it took a 10% stake in the expansion of a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Texas, called Rio Grande LNG, that was singled out in this week’s announcement.
Whether anyone can sue to stop the deal is another outstanding question.
The states of New York and North Carolina may be able to challenge the agreement, given that they stood to gain gigawatts’ worth of clean electricity if TotalEnergies had pursued its offshore wind projects. Community groups that could have benefited from the projects’ jobs and tax revenues are also considering their next steps — as are those that might be harmed by the expansion of these particular fossil-fuel projects.
Bekah Hinojosa, a community organizer in Brownsville, Texas, has been fighting the development of the Rio Grande LNG terminal for years, including during the Biden administration. Her organization, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, is part of a lawsuit challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s approval of the gas terminal’s expansion. Now, the group is considering how it can oppose Interior’s agreement with TotalEnergies.
“It definitely looks unjust,” she said. “We’re going to try to do everything we can to challenge and stop that deal from going forward.”
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