Legal Battles Over Offshore Energy: Regulation, Courts, and the Conflict Between Private versus Public Interests

This course provides an overview of how private or local actors activate courts to derail or delay government interests in offshore energy regulation and development.

Attendees will learn to assess the decentralized, privatized, and localized nature of U.S. energy development along with attendant regulatory processes and typical legal challenges via case law that attend offshore oil, natural gas, and wind energy projects in three extended U.S. case studies including Massachusetts, Ohio, and Louisiana. The course will also address other projects and the international context of offshore energy development.

This course is ideal for attorneys of all levels who want to learn more about the legal nuances of offshore energy battles.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify the untapped energy potential for substantial offshore energy generation in the United States, which is due to the decentralized, privatized, and localized structure of U.S. energy development policy
• Assess how U.S. energy policy is heavily driven by local interest that activate state and federal regulatory bodies along with courts to either facilitate or hinder offshore energy development often in contravention of government prerogatives
• Analyze the specific legal veto points in multi-year legal disputes over offshore energy projects including Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound offshore in Massachusetts, Icebreaker off the coast of Lake Erie in Ohio, and oil and gas platforms off the coast of Louisiana and Alaska
• Review recent state and federal caselaw around offshore energy projects and the broader political context of those lawsuits
•  Analyze the factors at play that might lead to success, substantial delay, or failure of any offshore project including future projects such as Ocean Wind 1 planned off the coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey
• Consider the travails of offshore renewable energy development in the United States in juxtaposition to the significant successful offshore projects already constructed and planned internationally such as the U.K.’s London Array, Norway’s Hywind Tampen wind farm, and China’s Jiangsu Qidong wind farm

Production Date: 8/23/2024