WASHINGTON — Oil and gas companies operating in federal waters will not have to submit more detailed archeological reports when they file business plans with the U.S. government, a requirement the Biden administration put in place last year.
Along New Jersey’s coastline is a trove of archeological sites, in particular shipwrecks, due in part to the two major shipping hubs — New York and Philadelphia — that have bookended the state for centuries.
In October, the Interior Department finished a new federal rule that required companies with oil and gas exploration plans to file a report about the archeology of the region they wanted to explore, including steps for reporting archeological finds and how to continue operating if confronted with a find.
Before the department finalized its rule, companies operating offshore only had to file plans if there was “reason to believe” the area where they were working contained an archeological resource.
Both chambers of Congress, the House and Senate, recently voted to strike down the Interior Department’s new regulation, sending legislation to revoke the Interior rule to President Donald Trump for his signature.
Party-line vote for NJ representatives
Republicans, who hold majorities in both halves of Congress, have used a 1990s law called the Congressional Review Act to nullify environmental and environmental rules since January, when they gained unified control in Washington.
The act can be used to strike down recent federal rules, and Republicans on Capitol Hill have done just that, including by taking aim at federal energy-conservation standards and an Environmental Protection Agency program to contain methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
On the archeological rule, New Jersey’s congressional delegation voted along party lines — Republicans to eliminate the regulation and Democrats to keep it.
Republicans from Texas and Louisiana, where offshore oil and gas production is an economic lifeblood, pushed the legislation, and the fossil fuel industry criticized the Biden-era rule before it was finished.
NJ’s bounty of shipwrecks
Deborah Whitcraft, president of the New Jersey Maritime Museum, told NJ Spotlight News in a 2018 interview that New Jersey has more shipwrecks along its coast than any other state.
The museum maintains a database of more than 4,800 shipwrecks along the New Jersey shoreline. The tally stretches back to the early 1700s.
Surveying the ocean floor is not just important for historical purposes, but it’s vital for worker safety, said Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, before the House voted to strike down the archeological rule.
A U.S. Army report issued in 2004 found 33 vessels had ‘dredged clams potentially containing munitions five miles off the New Jersey coast.’
“Marine archaeological surveys are not just a nice idea,” Huffman said. “They actually are safeguards that protect workers from hidden dangers lurking beneath the waves. These surveys can detect unexploded ordnance, UXOs, which are military ammunition that has never detonated.”
Huffman added: “There is actually a lot of that out there. From World War II into the 1970s, the federal government dumped massive amounts of UXOs into the ocean, including depth charges, torpedoes, munitions, mustard gas, and even chemical weapons, all in designated explosive dumping areas.”
Munitions on the seafloor
Unexploded weapons can also be found in areas leased for offshore wind, as developers of Ocean Wind 1, a now-defunct wind project that would have been built near Atlantic City, pointed out to federal regulators in an environmental impact statement about their project.
“While non-explosive methods may be employed to lift and move these objects, some may need to be detonated,” the developers said.
A U.S. Army report issued in 2004 found 33 vessels had “dredged clams potentially containing munitions five miles off the New Jersey coast.”
For and against
Bruce Westerman, a Republican congressman from Arkansas who led his party’s debate on this topic, said the Biden-era regulation was a burden on smaller firms operating in U.S. waters.
“It is not just Big Oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, it is also small producers, family-owned businesses, and thousands and thousands of people who make a living working in the Outer Continental Shelf,” Westerman said. “This burdensome regulation will be detrimental to those small businesses.”
Two indigenous tribes, the Rappahannock Indian Tribe and the Chickahominy Indian Tribe, both from modern-day Virginia, wrote federal officials in their support of the rule.
“The Tribe has a particular interest in understanding how our earliest ancestors lived, travelled, and persisted in the land now known as Virginia, evidence of which is likely to be submerged in river bottoms and along the coastal shelf features that represent Paleoindian shorelines,” G. Anne Richardson, Rappahannock chief, wrote to the Interior Department.
