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Tag Archives: offshore
‘Insidious: The Red Door’ Scares Up Best Overseas Horror Bow Since 2019; ’Indiana Jones’ Moves Dial To $248M Global; ‘Elemental’ Catching Fire Offshore; ‘Fast X’ Tops $700M WW – International Box Office – Deadline
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California offshore wind auction bids top $460 mln on day two
Dec 7 (Reuters) – The first ever auction of offshore wind development rights off the coast of California entered its second day on Wednesday, with high bids topping $460 million.
The Biden administration’s sale is a major milestone in the its goal to put turbines along every U.S. coastline and a critical test of developer appetite for investment in floating wind turbines, an emerging technology necessary in locations where the ocean floor is too deep for fixed equipment.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is auctioning five lease areas equal to a combined 373,267 acres (151,056 hectares) off the state’s north and central coasts. Previous federal offshore wind auctions have all been for leases in shallower waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
After 22 rounds of bidding, high bids totaled a combined $462.1 million. Two leases off the central coast had commanded high bids of more than $100 million, with the remaining leases attracting high bids in a range of $62.7 million to $98.8 million, according to live auction results on the BOEM web site.
The identities of the bidders are not disclosed during the auction, but 43 companies had been approved to participate.
They include established offshore wind players like Avangrid Inc (AGR.N), Orsted (ORSTED.CO) and Equinor (EQNR.OL), which are all developing projects on the U.S. East Coast, as well as potential new entrants including Swedish floating wind developer Hexicon (HEXI.ST) and Macquarie (MQG.AX) unit Corio.
Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Alexander Smith
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Sale jumpstarts floating, offshore wind power in US waters
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Tuesday marks the first-ever U.S. auction of leases to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms, in the deep waters off the West Coast.
The live, online auction for the five leases — three off California’s central coast and two off its northern coast — has attracted strong interest and 43 companies from around the world are approved to bid. The wind turbines will float roughly 25 miles offshore.
The growth of offshore wind comes as climate change intensifies and need for clean energy grows. It also is getting cheaper. The cost of developing offshore wind has dropped 60% since 2010 according to a July report by the International Renewable Energy Agency. It declined 13% in 2021 alone.
Offshore wind is well established in the U.K. and some other countries but is just beginning to ramp up off America’s coasts, and this is the nation’s first foray into floating wind turbines. Auctions so far have been for those anchored to the seafloor.
Europe has some floating offshore wind — a project in the North Sea has been operating since 2017 — but the potential for the technology is huge in areas of strong wind off America’s coasts, said Josh Kaplowitz, vice president of offshore wind at the American Clean Power Association.
“We know that this works. We know that this can provide a huge slice of our our electricity needs, and if we’re going to solve the climate crisis we need to put as many clean electrons online as we can, particularly given increases in load demand with electric vehicles,” he said. “We can reach our greenhouse gas goals only with offshore wind as part of the puzzle.”
Similar auctions are in the works off Oregon’s coast next year and in the Gulf of Maine in 2024. President Joe Biden set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 using traditional technology that secures wind turbines to the ocean floor, enough to power 10 million homes. Then the administration announced plans in September to develop floating platforms that could vastly expand offshore wind in the United States.
The nation’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Rhode Island in late 2016, allowing residents of small Block Island to shut off five diesel generators. Wind advocates took notice, but with five turbines, it’s not commercial scale.
Globally, as of 2021, there were only 123 megawatts of floating offshore wind operating, but that number is projected to increase to nearly 19 gigawatts — 150 times more — by 2030, according to a report last week by Offshore Wind California.
The California sale is designed to promote a domestic supply chain and create union jobs. Bidders can convert part of their bids into credits that benefit those affected by the wind development — local communities, tribes and commercial fishermen.
As envisioned, the turbines — possibly nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower — will float on giant triangular platforms roughly the size of a small city block or buoyant cylinders with cables anchoring them underwater. They’ll each have three blades longer than the distance from home plate to the outfield on a baseball diamond, and will need to be assembled onshore and towed, upright, to their open-ocean destination.
Modern tall turbines, whether on or offshore, can produce more than 20 times more electricity than shorter machines, say, from the early 1990s.
As for visibility, “in absolutely perfect conditions, crystal clear on the best days, at the highest point, you might be able to see small dots on the horizon,” said Larry Oetker, executive director of the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District, which has been preparing its deep-water port for the projects.
Offshore wind is a good complement to solar energy, which shuts down at night. Winds far out to sea are stronger and more sustained and also pick up in the evening, just when solar is going offline yet demand is high, said Jim Berger, a partner at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright who specializes in financing renewable energy projects.
California has a 2045 goal of carbon neutrality. But “when the sun goes down we’re relying more on fossil fuel generation,” Berger said. “These projects are huge so when you add a project or a couple projects, you’re adding significantly to the power generation base in the state,” he said.
The lease areas have the potential to generate 4.5 gigawatts of energy — enough for 1.5 million homes — and could bring big changes to communities in the rural coastal regions nearest the leases.
In remote Humboldt County, in northern California, the offshore projects are expected to generate more than 4,000 thousand jobs and $38 million in state and local tax revenue in an area that’s been economically depressed ever since the decline of the timber industry in the 1970s and 1980s, according to the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District.
The district already received $12 million from California to prepare its deep-water port for the potential assembly of the massive turbines, which are too tall to fit under most bridges as they are towed out to sea, said Oetker, the district’s executive director.
“We have hundreds of acres of vacant, underutilized industrial property right on the existing navigation channel … and there’s no overhead bridges or power lines or anything,” he said.
But some are also wary of the projects, despite favoring a transition to clean energy.
Environmentalists are concerned about the impacts on threatened and endangered whales, which could become entangled in the cables that will anchor the turbines. There are also concerns about birds and bats colliding with the turbine blades and whales getting struck by vessels towing components to the site. Federal regulators have set a boating speed limit for the project of less than 12 mph to address that concern, said Kristen Hislop, senior director of the marine program at the Environmental Defense Center.
“Floating offshore wind is brand new and there’s only a couple projects in the world and we don’t know how that’s going to impact our coast,” she said.
Tribes in the vast coastal regions also worry about damage to their ancestral lands from turbine assembly plants and transmission infrastructure. They fear that the farms will be visible on clear days from sacred prayer spots high in the mountains.
Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, has attended four wind developer conferences in the past year. Tribes worked with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is overseeing the leasing process, to secure a 5% bid credit that includes tribal communities for the first time, he said. The agency also helped with a cultural assessment of the potential impact on views from sacred prayer spots, he said.
The tribes are so engaged now, early on, because they are used to outside industries coming to them with promises that aren’t fulfilled. They’ve seen things done wrong, and knowing this windswept area intimately, they want this to be done right, he said.
“Before they even showed us the map, before they even showed us all of their breakdowns … we were like, ’We know exactly where it’s going,’” Myers said. “There’s no question where the best wind comes from, we all understand that. We’ve been here for a couple of thousand years.”
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The U.S. looks to rival Europe and Asia with massive floating offshore wind plan
The Block Island Wind Farm, photographed in 2016, is located in waters off the east coast of the United States.
DON EMMERT | AFP | Getty Images
The White House said Thursday it was targeting 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind capacity by the year 2035, as it looks to compete with Europe and Asia in the nascent sector.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is launching coordinated actions to develop new floating offshore wind platforms, an emerging clean energy technology that will help the United States lead on offshore wind,” a statement, which was also published by U.S. Department of the Interior, said.
The announcement said the 15 GW goal would provide sufficient clean energy to power more than 5 million homes. It builds on the administration’s aim of hitting 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030, an existing ambition which will mostly be met by fixed-bottom installations.
Alongside the 15 GW ambition, a “Floating Offshore Wind Shot” would “aim to reduce the costs of floating technologies by more than 70% by 2035, to $45 per megawatt-hour,” the statement added.
“Bringing floating offshore wind technology to scale will unlock new opportunities for offshore wind power off the coasts of California and Oregon, in the Gulf of Maine, and beyond,” it said.
Floating offshore wind turbines are different to fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines, which are rooted to the seabed. One advantage of floating turbines is that they can be installed in far deeper waters compared to fixed-bottom ones.
In a fact sheet outlining its plans, the U.S. Department of Energy said around two thirds of America’s offshore wind potential existed “over bodies of water too deep for ‘fixed-bottom’ wind turbine foundations that are secured to the sea floor.”
“Harnessing power over waters hundreds to thousands of feet deep requires floating offshore wind technology — turbines mounted to a floating foundation or platform that is anchored to the seabed with mooring lines,” it said. “These installations are among the largest rotating machines ever constructed.”
In recent years, a number of large companies have made plays in the floating offshore wind sector.
Back in 2017, Norwegian energy firm Equinor — a major player in oil and gas — opened Hywind Scotland, a five turbine, 30 megawatt facility it calls the “world’s first floating wind farm.”
Last year also saw a number of major developments in the emerging industry.
In Aug. 2021, RWE Renewables and Kansai Electric Power signed an agreement that would see the two businesses “jointly study the feasibility of a large-scale floating offshore wind project” in waters off Japan’s coast.
Norwegian company Statkraft also announced that a long-term purchasing agreement related to a large floating offshore wind farm off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, had started. And a few months later, in Dec. 2021, plans for three major offshore wind developments in Australia — two of which are slated to incorporate floating wind tech — were announced.
When it comes to offshore wind more broadly, the U.S. has a long way to go to catch up with Europe.
The country’s first offshore wind facility, the 30 MW Block Island Wind Farm, only started commercial operations in late 2016.
In comparison, Europe installed 17.4 GW of wind power capacity in 2021, according to figures from industry body WindEurope.
Change is coming, however, and in Nov. 2021 ground was broken on a project dubbed the United States’ first commercial scale offshore wind farm.
Biden releases five-year offshore leasing plan Friday
The plan may move the country further from its pledge to slash the nation’s planet-warming pollution in half by 2030 compared with 2005 levels, and help avert even fiercer fires, storms and drought driven by rising temperatures. Biden’s climate agenda now hinges on whether Democrats can pass a reconciliation package in the Senate that includes robust environmental policies.
“The Supreme Court just put a lead ball around his ankle with regard to his executive authority,” said John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “If you don’t get reconciliation, together with the constraints that the Supreme Court has put on, I think there’s no way you can get the 50 percent reduction by the end of the decade.”
But the offshore plan, along with other events this week, underscores the political and legal limits in the United States to tackle global warming, and carries risks for Democrats as Americans experience record-breaking gasoline prices ahead of November’s midterm election and as many in Biden’s base demand stricter limits on fossil fuels.
On Thursday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck a blow to the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to force power providers to stop burning coal. And Biden’s Interior Department was compelled by an injunction from a lower court to lease acreage in the Western United States this week for onshore drilling.
The consequences of warming 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels by continuing to burn other fossil fuels are enormous for humanity: If left unchecked, global warming may stall headway on combating hunger, poverty and disease worldwide. The International Energy Agency has urged halting investment in new fossil fuel supplies to meet that goal.
“We’re going to be slowing down the progress that we otherwise might be making,” said Brian O’Neill, a chief scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute and a lead author on a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on impacts and vulnerability.
The Interior Department is considering 10 potential auctions in the Gulf of Mexico and one in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland emphasized that the plan has not been finalized and that her department is considering the option of having no lease sales at all. The plan narrows areas considered for oil and gas leasing from one proposed under President Donald Trump in 2018.
“A Proposed Program is not a decision to issue specific leases or to authorize any drilling or development,” Haaland said in a statement. “From Day One, President Biden and I have made clear our commitment to transition to a clean energy economy.”
During his bid for the White House, Biden vowed to ban new oil and gas drilling across federal lands and waters. “No more drilling on federal lands, period,” he said at a campaign event in New Hampshire. “Period, period, period.”
In the Senate, there is growing optimism that Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who effectively ended negotiations over a previous iteration of a sweeping package, can strike a deal.
Since December, when Manchin blocked Biden’s original Build Back Better proposal, the senator has expressed reservations about the price tag of any potential package, warning about the rising national debt and skyrocketing inflation. But with only 50 seats in the Senate, the party needs Manchin’s vote to pass any legislation. As a result, party leaders have relented and cut many of their domestic priorities from the proposed package.
Energy policy, though, is still expected to remain a centerpiece of the potential bill, as Manchin has long called for protecting the United States’ energy security and increasing its energy independence from foreign nations. But aides say negotiations over what the energy and climate components of the deal would look like are still underway and final decisions are probably weeks away.
In a statement Friday, Manchin said he was “pleased” the plan had come out, though he was “disappointed to see that ‘zero’ lease sales is even an option on the table.”
“Our leasing programs are a critical component of American energy security,” Manchin said. “I hope the administration will ultimately greenlight a plan that will expand domestic energy production, done in the cleanest way possible, while also taking the necessary steps to get our offshore leasing program back on track to give the necessary market signals to provide price relief for every American.”
Environmentalists and other Democratic lawmakers expressed their frustration with Biden considering any new offshore leases, given the risks posed by climate change and oil spills, while the industry representatives agitated for more auctions to lessen reliance on foreign energy.
“Holding any new offshore oil and gas lease sales over the next five years is a lose-lose for Americans,” Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. “It will do nothing to help lower prices at the pump, and it will make our emissions goals virtually impossible to achieve.”
“It’s hugely important to recognize that the Biden administration has the discretion to propose a five-year leasing program that does not provide for any new lease sales,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm.
Industry officials called the proposal too restrictive.
“Today’s announcement sends more mixed signals from the administration and is another punch in the gut to consumers and businesses suffering from high energy prices and inflation,” said Marty Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.
Federal law requires Interior to release a plan for new offshore oil and gas lease sales every five years, but the law gives the administration broad discretion. Biden officials said the crafting of the plan was fraught.
It came out as the administration struggles to chart its next steps on climate, given Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling. Biden officials said that while they had largely expected to lose the case, senior aides remain shocked and demoralized as they reckon with the limits on their ability to combat climate change. They conceded that there is a sense of despondency pervasive throughout the offices working on climate policy.
Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser who crafted the EPA rule at the center of the Supreme Court case, has emphasized in recent days that the administration is focused on finding alternative ways, particularly through the Defense Production Act, to continue to meet their climate goals.
“His use of the Defense Production Act to accelerate all this domestic production is really, I think, going to be one of the ways in which this president makes it clear to people that he is going to keep driving the change that’s necessary,” McCarthy said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, referring to Biden’s push to make rare earth minerals available for the electrical vehicle market.
And the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, said the administration can still achieve its climate targets despite the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Biden’s efforts to curtail fossil fuel drilling, however, have faced serious legal and political setbacks.
Soon after taking office, he followed up with an executive order instructing Interior to pause all new lease sales on public lands and waters while it reviewed how to adjust the program. A federal judge in Louisiana last year blocked that pause.
Republican lawmakers and oil industry lobbyists have urged the administration to boost America’s fossil fuel production to help curb record prices at the pump. The national average for a gallon of gasoline hit $4.84 Friday, according to AAA, up by more than 50 percent this year.
“If the administration is serious about reducing prices at the pump, they should be expanding access to oil and natural gas on federal lands, not killing it,” Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a recent statement.
It takes about five to 10 years to start producing oil from a new offshore lease, according to the Interior Department. That means the proposal issued Friday will have little immediate impact on current prices at the pump — though it could have significant implications for the United States’ ability to meet its pledge to cut emissions by 2030 at least in half compared to 2005 levels.
Biden administration officials privately acknowledge that soaring fuel prices could imperil congressional Democrats’ chances in November’s midterm elections. They have taken several steps to lower gas prices that are anathema to climate activists, such as authorizing a historically large release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The western and central portion of the Gulf of Mexico makes up the heart of the U.S. offshore energy business, where about 1.7 million barrels of oil are extracted a day mainly off the coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and piped to refineries to be turned into gasoline, jet fuel and plastics.
Energy companies have worked for years to drill for oil and gas well beyond the Gulf, off the East and West coasts. But those hopes dimmed in 2010 when a rig boring an offshore exploratory well exploded and led to the deaths of 11 crewmen, setting off the worst marine oil spill in U.S. history.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed hundreds of thousands of birds, uncorked millions of barrels of oil into the ocean and stymied efforts to expand offshore oil exploration in the United States.
After the spill, President Barack Obama halted plans to expand drilling to parts of the eastern Gulf, near Florida, as well as along the East Coast. His successor, Donald Trump, sought to expand drilling up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, only to retreat after governors in both parties from Maine to Florida opposed the plan.
Even energy industry representatives concede there won’t be drilling soon in the Atlantic or Pacific.
“We understand, politically, there’s not going to be production there, potentially for a long time,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore oil, gas and wind firms.
The Biden administration’s ability to carry out the president’s vow to stop new drilling is also being tested ashore, across hundreds of millions of acres managed by federal government out West.
Interior’s Bureau of Land Management netted $22 million by offering about 130,000 acres for drilling across seven states this week. Immediately, a coalition of environmental groups sued to stop the administration, urging it to find a way to forestall auctions despite facing a court order.
“Overwhelming scientific evidence shows us that burning fossil fuels from existing leases on federal lands is incompatible with a livable climate,” Melissa Hornbein, senior attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center, said in a statement.
Taiwan’s ‘biggest offshore wind farm’ generates its first power
An offshore wind turbine in waters off Taiwan. Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs says it’s targeting 20% renewable energy generation by the middle of this decade.
Billy H.C. Kwok | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A large-scale offshore wind farm in waters off the coast of Taiwan has produced its first power, with those involved in the project describing the news as a “major milestone.”
In a statement Thursday, Danish energy firm Orsted said the first power at the Greater Changhua 1 & 2a facility was delivered on schedule following the installation of its initial set of wind turbines.
Electricity, it said, had been “transferred to Orsted’s onshore substations via array cables, offshore substations, and export cables. The renewable energy was fed into the national grid via Taipower’s substation.” Taipower is a state-owned utility.
Situated 35 to 60 kilometers off Taiwan’s west coast, the scale of Changhua 1 & 2a is considerable, with Orsted describing it as “Taiwan’s biggest offshore wind farm.”
It will have a capacity of approximately 900 megawatts and use 111 turbines from Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy. Capacity refers to the maximum amount of electricity installations can produce, not what they’re necessarily generating.
It’s hoped that construction of the project will wrap up this year. According to Orsted, the facility will eventually generate enough power to meet the needs of 1 million households in Taiwan.
“Delivering the first power as scheduled is a major milestone for both Orsted and Taiwan,” Christy Wang, who is general manager of Orsted Taiwan, said. “This has not been an easy task, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic challenges during the past two years,” Wang later added.
Thursday’s announcement represents a step forward for Taiwan’s offshore wind sector but a report from the Global Wind Energy Council, published in April, highlighted how things have not all been plain sailing.
“Taiwan should have commissioned more than 1 GW [gigawatt] of offshore wind capacity from three projects last year based on the project COD [commercial operation date] plans, but only the 109 MW Changhua demonstration came online in the end,” the Global Wind Report for 2022 said. The delay, the GWEC added, had been “primarily caused by COVID-19 related disruption.”
In Asia, the GWEC’s report puts Taiwan second only to China in terms of planned offshore wind installations in the near to mid-term.
According to the trade association, China is slated to add 39 GW of offshore wind over the next five years, with Taiwan set to install 6.6 GW. Vietnam, South Korea and Japan are seen as adding 2.2, 1.7 and 1 GW respectively.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs says it’s targeting 20% renewable energy generation by the middle of this decade.
“The goal for PV [photovoltaic] installation has been set at 20GW by 2025, while offshore wind power is expected to exceed 5.7GW,” it says. Solar photovoltaic refers to a way of directly converting sunlight into electricity. Authorities in Taiwan also want natural gas to account for 50% of power generation in 2025.
Shifting Taiwan’s generation mix to one where renewables have a larger role represents a big task. Citing data from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan’s Bureau of Foreign Trade says 44.69% of total power generation in 2021 came from coal firing.
Natural gas’ share amounted to 36.77%, with nuclear responsible for 9.63% and renewables 5.94%. Fuel oil and pumped-storage hydroelectricity contributed 1.87% and 1.10%.
U.S. offshore wind auction attracts record-setting bids
Feb 23 (Reuters) – The largest ever U.S. sale of offshore wind development rights – for areas off the coasts of New York and New Jersey – attracted record-setting bids on Wednesday from companies seeking to be a part of President Joe Biden’s plan to create a booming new domestic industry.
It is the first offshore wind lease sale under Biden, who has made expansion of offshore wind a cornerstone of his strategy to address global warming and decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035, all while creating thousands of jobs.
With bidding still underway, the auction was on track to easily top the $405 million U.S. offshore wind auction record set in 2018, according to updates posted on the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) web site.
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After 11 rounds, bidding stood at a record-setting $250 million for a single lease 32 miles (51.5 km) off the coast of New Jersey. The government had identified that 114-acre area – the largest offered in the sale – as being capable of producing power for more than 485,000 homes.
The previous record amount paid for a U.S. offshore wind lease was $135.1 million in 2018 for a lease off the coast of Massachusetts.
High bids on each of the other five areas in the auction ranged between $12.6 million and $134.3 million as of Wednesday afternoon.
The auction’s scale marks a major step forward for offshore wind power in the United States, which has lagged European nations in developing the technology. Currently, the United States has just two small offshore wind facilities, off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia, along with two additional commercial-scale projects recently approved for development.
BOEM, which has not held an auction for wind leases since 2018, is offering 488,201 acres (197,568 hectares) in shallow waters between New York’s Long Island and New Jersey, an area known as the New York Bight.
The area is 22% smaller than what was initially proposed last summer due to concerns about the developments’ impact to commercial fishing and military interests.
‘ENOUGH WIND TO POWER MILLIONS OF HOMES’
The sale’s 25 approved bidders include entities controlled by Equinor ASA (EQNR.OL), Avangrid Inc (AGR.N), BP Plc and Eletricite de France SA (EDF.PA), according to government documents. Each bidder may only win one lease.
The energy generated from the newly offered areas could one day power nearly 2 million homes, the administration has said.
Last year, the Biden administration set a goal of installing 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2030 along the nation’s coastlines. Much of the current development is happening in waters off of Northeastern states.
New York and New Jersey have set targets of building more than 16 GW of offshore wind by 2035, and Wednesday’s lease areas – which lie between 20 and 69 nautical miles off the coast, according to BOEM – could deliver more than a third of that capacity.
“That’s enough wind to power millions of homes,” Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, said in an interview. “That’s a big deal in a state with about nine million people.”
Not everyone supports offshore wind development. The Biden administration’s ambitions have stoked concerns among commercial fishermen and coastal communities about harm to their livelihoods and property values.
In January, a group of New Jersey residents sued BOEM over its leasing plans for the New York Bight. The group, from the summer colony of Long Beach Island, is concerned about the aesthetic impacts of the turbines and potential lost tourism.
Greg Cudnik, owner of a fishing charter boat business on Long Beach Island, worries about what thousands of wind turbines will do to the ocean habitat.
“For all this that’s taking place and all this that is put in jeopardy, to me, I don’t see the net benefit,” Cudnik said.
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Reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles and Christine Kiernan in Ship Bottom, New Jersey; Editing by Bill Berkrot
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
China proposes tighter rules but no ban for offshore listings
BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – China’s securities watchdog on Friday proposed tightening rules governing Chinese companies listing abroad, which it said would improve oversight while allowing them to continue to do so, the latest in a spate of regulatory moves by Beijing in 2021.
The draft rules, which had been keenly awaited by investors and were posted by the China Securities Regulatory Commission on its website, extend the CSRC’s oversight of offshore listings to Chinese firms with variable interest entity (VIE) structures.
There had been much uncertainty among investors and Chinese firms over how much tighter the new rules would be.
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“China is tightening the screws on offshore listings but not turning the valves off completely,” Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research, said of the plans.
The CSRC said that the existing rules regulating offshore listings were outdated and the proposed new ones reflect China’s desire to further open up and are “not about policy tightening”.
Previously, the regulator would only examine companies incorporated onshore in China that proposed an offshore listing, such as in Hong Kong.
Beijing has unleashed a flurry of regulatory tightening this year under President Xi Jinping, including clamping down on anti-competitive behavior, banning private tuition groups and reining in a debt binge by property developers in a wide-ranging campaign that has rattled domestic and global markets.
VIEs have mostly been used by companies that list on offshore stock markets, primarily the United States, to skirt Chinese rules restricting foreign investment in sensitive industries such as media and telecommunications.
Most offshore-listed Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba Group Holdings and JD.com Inc , use the structures, which give them more flexibility to raise capital, while also bypassing the scrutiny and lengthy IPO vetting process that locally-incorporated companies have to go through.
“The real key is how much data needs to be retained, location of servers, and whether the U.S. or China has responsibility for accounting,” Collier said.
CSRC said the proposed registration process should take up to 20 working days if adequate materials were submitted.
It will also require international banks that underwrite a Chinese firm’s offshore listing to register with the CSRC.
DIDI IMPACT
Offshore IPOs have provided an alternative source of capital for Chinese companies and a New York listing has been seen as a badge of honor for many.
But Beijing has been ramping up supervision of overseas listings since the $4.4 billion initial public offering (IPO) of ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc (DIDI.N) and the proposals on Friday were not as stringent as some had expected.
Chinese firms have raised about $12.8 billion in U.S. listings in 2021, according to Refinitiv data, but the deals ground to a halt after Didi’s debut in New York in early July.
The CSRC said Chinese regulators respected the choices made by companies on listing locations and the rules would not be retroactively applied, adding that it would not consider whether firms met the requirements of overseas listing locations.
But the Chinese government can order a company to dispose of its assets or businesses if its offshore listing jeopardizes national security, according to the proposed new rules.
The announcement came as U.S. markets were closed on Friday for the Christmas holiday period.
In a VIE, a Chinese firm sets up an offshore company for an overseas listing that allows foreign investors to buy into it.
The offshore company enters into a series of contracts with the owner of the local Chinese company, which operates the business in China, to obtain 100% economic interest in that business, analysts have said previously.
Chinese IPOs on all world markets have reached a record $100 billion this year, Refinitiv data showed.
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Reporting by Kane Wu, Samuel Shen, Selena Li, Julie Zhu; Beijing Newsroom; Writing by Scott Murdoch and Tom Daly; Editing by Alexander Smith
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Orange County offshore oil sheen likely related to repair work on damaged line, not a new spill, officials say
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (KABC) — An oil sheen reported on the water off Orange County on Saturday near the location of an earlier spill was likely a result of repair work being done in the area and not a new spill – and was not visible later in the day, officials said.
The U.S. Coast Guard said by Saturday afternoon it did not observe the sheen that was reported earlier in the day, according to updates from local elected officials.
Earlier Saturday, authorities were investigating a report of an oil sheen measuring about 30 feet by 70 feet on the water in the area where crews continue to make repairs to a damaged pipeline that resulted in an oil leak of some 25,000 gallons in early October.
The observation sparked concerns about a new spill in the area.
By later in the afternoon, authorities said the sheen was likely related to the repair work and not an indication of a fresh leak.
“We are expecting another flash alert later this afternoon, but initial observations from @uscoastguard & @CaliforniaDFW are not seeing signs of an oil spill,” state Sen. Dave Min tweeted. “Possible that the first sheen was related to remedial work being done on the damaged pipeline.”
Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley says the initial sheen was reported by crews approaching the pipeline for scheduled repair work.
Divers then observed oil droplets on the syntho-glass wrap covering the damaged line, Foley said. They removed the old wrap and installed a new one. As of 2 p.m. no sheen has been observed in the area, she said.
The pipeline itself has remained shut down since the initial spill on Oct. 2.
Authorities are still investigating to see if the sheen is related to the droplets found on the wrap.
Early last month, a pipeline owned by Houston-based Amplify Energy leaked at least about 25,000 gallons of crude oil into the ocean off the coast of Orange County. Blobs of oil washed ashore, oiling birds and shuttering the famed shoreline of Huntington Beach for a week.
BREAKING NEWS:#OCOILSPILL
I received word from Unified Command:
Sheen seen in area of pipeline. Sending resources to investigate now. Source unknown at this time.Media inquiries call 3107810619 pic.twitter.com/Yrv2AWpakc
— Supervisor Katrina Foley (@SupervisorFoley) November 20, 2021
Environmentalists braced for the worst but the damage has been less than initially feared. Much of the oil broke up at sea and local officials put up booms to keep the crude out of sensitive wetlands.
The cause of that spill is under investigation, but federal officials have said the pipeline was likely initially damaged by a ship’s anchor.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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