MANCHIN: WITHOUT IRA WE WOULD HAVE ZERO LEASE SALES

Press Release

"Even as this Administration was attempting to end federal oil and gas leasing altogether, because of my insistence that the Inflation Reduction Act take a balanced approach to energy security, we are looking at a future that involves at least some continued offshore energy leasing of all types. Before we passed the IRA, it was obvious that the Department of the Interior was slow walking the next Five-Year Program while at the same time canceling already-scheduled Lease Sales. To address that, in the IRA we prohibited Interior from issuing wind and solar leases unless the Department also holds significant oil and gas lease sales, both on- and offshore. As a result, Interior was forced to include oil and gas lease sales in their recently released 2024 to 2029 Leasing Program. To be clear, the new five-year leasing program falls well short of what we should be doing by including only three oil and gas sales. This is barely a quarter of what the Obama administration approved for the last five-year program. But it's clear we would have gotten exactly zero without the IRA."

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