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WASHINGTON (CN) — A coalition of seven states led by New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for canceling an offshore wind project near New York and pushing the parent company to invest the money instead in oil and gas projects in Texas.
James, joined by the attorneys general of New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont, sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia arguing the settlement would wrongfully erase thousands of jobs.
In 2022, TotalEnergies’ subsidiary Attentive Energy purchased an 84,000-acre offshore wind lease in the New York Bight, a shallow region of ocean between Long Island and the New Jersey coast. The project would have provided power to more than 1.3 million people in New York and New Jersey, particularly in New York City.
On March 23, the Trump administration announced it had reached an agreement with TotalEnergies to terminate the lease and reimburse the $795 million it paid.
The Department of the Interior stated in the announcement that the project was canceled in part due to “national security concerns,” an argument the government has raised repeatedly in its efforts to tamp down on green energy projects.
In exchange, the company would invest that $795 million into oil and gas development and agree not to sue over the canceled lease. The company also agreed to cancel a lease in the Carolina Long Bay, which brought the total reimbursement amount to $928 million.
Those funds would specifically go toward the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant and the development of “upstream conventional oil” production and shale gas production. According to TotalEnergies, the company itself first approached the Interior Department proposing the cancellation.
The coalition is asking a federal judge to declare the lease cancellation and settlement agreement as unlawful and vacate it.
James, with New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha and Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, argue the cancellation violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and the National Environmental Procedure Act.
“The Trump administration is once again trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers,” James said in a statement. “After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore win and invest in oil and gas instead. We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”
Under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the interior secretary may only cancel a lease after determining via hearing whether it would cause serious harm or damage to the environment, minerals or national security.
Further, James argues, the secretary must confirm that the threat will not disappear over time and that the advantages of cancellation outweigh the advantages of continuing the lease.
The Interior Department’s national security concerns were entirely pretextual, just as a federal judge found in the case of a similar project, Revolution Wind in New England, which was nearly 80% complete when the government moved to cancel it.
Without the wind project, New York City faces harms both electrical and environmental, depriving the city of a key project in its plan to add at least five gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040.
According to James, the offshore project was expected to deliver New York $1.9 billion in avoided healthcare costs caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The project would have also provided 1,716 new jobs in the state. New Jersey and the New England states were also set to reap significant benefits.
An Interior Department spokesperson said in an email to Courthouse News that the settlements were reviewed and approved by the Justice Department and thus went through the appropriate channels.
“The only thing blatantly unlawful here was the process by which these offshore wind leases were negotiated and imposed under the Biden administration,” the spokesperson said. “Billions of dollars were effectively taken from the pockets of hardworking taxpayers and funneled into energy projects that were not only unreliable, but also unaffordable.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul further slammed the deal in a statement.
“This pay-not-to-play scheme pressuring a foreign company to forego planned offshore wind projects in America in favor of gas and oil drilling is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars that hurts our ability to meet our energy needs, create good jobs and help secure American energy independence while reducing emissions,” Hochul said. “Attorney General James and I will continue to aggressively fight back against Donald Trump’s overt and never-ending hostility toward offshore wind, including his unlawful use of the most powerful office in the world to get private companies like TotalEnergies to bow to his will.”
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