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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Issues: offshore drilling

How Trump May Be Able to Stop Biden’s Ban on New Offshore Drilling

How Trump May Be Able to Stop Biden’s Ban on New Offshore Drilling
January 14, 2025

President-elect Donald Trump said that when he takes office he will “immediately” reverse President Joe Biden’s recent executive action making more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters off limits for new offshore drilling. But Trump’s intent to quickly “unban” any future oil and gas drilling in those areas may not be as simple as he suggests.

U.S. Oil Reserves

March 16, 2009

Q: Are anti-drilling forces blocking access to the world’s largest oil reserve in the western U.S.?
A: The Bakken Formation touted in a chain e-mail isn’t the world’s largest oil reserve. The amount of oil it contains, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is less than one one-hundredth of the estimate cited in the e-mail.