Oil and gas executives are expressing concern about the Trump administration’s attacks on offshore wind, including attempts to block the construction of projects off the East Coast.
Executives generally have refrained from publicly denouncing President Trump, but in interviews with The New York Times, some voiced misgivings about what they have seen as undue political meddling in energy.
“Ever-changing policy, particularly as administrations change, is not good for business,” Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said in a recent interview. “It’s not good for the economy and ultimately, it’s not good for people.”
Mr. Woods, who runs the largest U.S. oil and gas company, was responding to a question about the Trump administration’s attempts to halt fully permitted offshore wind farms. He stopped short of directly criticizing those actions.
Others have shared more pointed concerns privately, including that efforts to rescind federal approvals could set a precedent that a future administration could use to hamper pipelines or other fossil fuel infrastructure.
“Life is long, and the sword being wielded against the renewables industry right now will likely boomerang back in 3.5 years against traditional energy,” reads a response to a recent anonymized survey of oil and gas companies by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
A federal judge recently allowed work to restart on one offshore wind project that the Trump administration tried to stop, a nearly complete wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island called Revolution Wind. Another, Empire Wind, was able to proceed after federal officials lifted a stop-work order after negotiations with Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat.
The Trump administration has said it wanted to assess how offshore wind farms might affect national security.
Asked about the oil and gas industry’s concerns, a White House spokeswoman, Taylor Rogers, criticized the actions of Mr. Trump’s predecessors.
“It was Obama and Biden who declared war on the energy industry by shutting down gas pipelines, banning offshore drilling in large parts of our waters, halting L.N.G. export terminals and freezing coal mining projects,” she said.
Mr. Trump is not the first president to oppose energy projects, though the practice appears to be escalating. President Joseph R. Biden revoked a federal permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline in 2021, saying the project was not in the national interest. The pipeline, which would have carried oil from Alberta to Nebraska, was under construction.
Mr. Biden also paused federal approvals for new natural gas export infrastructure last year to study how they would affect the climate, economy and national security. A federal judge later ordered that the pause be lifted.
Mr. Trump has been especially blunt in attacking wind turbines and has made unfounded claims about them, including that they cause cancer and are responsible for whale deaths.
His administration has sought to block all new leasing for wind farms on federal lands and waters and moved to revoke federal approval for other permitted wind developments off the coasts of Maryland and Massachusetts. The White House also recently instructed a half-dozen federal agencies to probe the risks of offshore wind, The Times has reported.
“Windmills, we’re just not going to allow them,” Mr. Trump said during a recent cabinet meeting.
The quicker phaseout of tax credits for wind power, passed by Congress this summer, is only adding to the industry’s troubles. Energy analysts now expect that no new offshore wind farms will get built in the United States after 2028.
“I feel for the wind guys, man,” said Toby Rice, the chief executive of Pittsburgh-based EQT, one of the country’s largest natural gas producers. “I know exactly how it feels when you have an energy project that’s close to getting built getting stopped. I would like to see a world where that doesn’t happen.”
Trade organizations have said they are especially concerned about the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke already-granted permits.
“Not only does this inject significant uncertainty into the infrastructure development process, but it invariably increases the price of the projects and risks raising the cost of electricity, diminishing our ability to meet growing demand,” Martin Durbin, the senior vice president of policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote earlier this month.
Jason Grumet, who leads the American Clean Power Association, has said his trade group of renewable energy companies has heard from members that there is now a risk premium associated with investing in the United States.
“Which is horrifying,” Mr. Grumet said. “We always were the rule-of-law place.”
Mike Sommers, the chief executive of the oil industry’s main trade organization, the American Petroleum Institute, has called on Congress to reform and streamline federal permitting, saying on a recent Politico Energy podcast episode that “we’ve seen both sides of the aisle abuse the permitting process.”
Still, Mr. Sommers expressed a measure of frustration about past opposition to oil and gas projects.
“I didn’t see a lot of clean energy lobbyists out there saying that we should get the Keystone XL pipeline built,” he told Politico.