HOUSTON — The U.S. Department of the Interior and TotalEnergies have announced an agreement under which the French global energy giant will give up leases for two offshore wind projects in return for nearly $1 billion that will be invested in American fossil fuel production.

As part of the agreement, DOI will terminate the leases for TotalEnergies’ Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay projects off the New York and North Carolina shorelines. Interior will reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million for the original lease expense after the company invests in developing U.S. natural gas exports, shale gas production and offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné signed the agreement March 23 on the sidelines of CERAWeek by S&P Global.

“The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecured energy is officially over and the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay,” Burgum told reporters during a press conference.

The secretary framed the agreement as “unleashing” nearly $1 billion tied up in a lease deposit made during the Biden administration and criticized subsidies “pushing expensive weather-dependent offshore wind.”

“Those subsidies were directed toward picking winners and those winners were forms of energy that were not only expensive, but they were intermittent,” Burgum said, adding the previous administration “lured” companies into “inefficient developments” with “massive” tax subsidies that created “artificial demand.”

“This administration believes in energy reality. We are not driven by climate fantasy,” he said.

In response, the offshore wind trade group Oceantic Network released a statement from Sam Salustro, senior vice president of policy and market affairs, that accused the Trump administration of political theater.

“After failing to shut down offshore wind through strong-arm tactics and litigation losses, the administration is now spending $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to force developers out of the market — wrapped in a false narrative about affordability, reliability and national security,” Salustro said.

Abandoning OSW in the U.S.

Pouyanné, who has said offshore wind is a pillar of the energy transition, said the company is not renouncing offshore wind but it is abandoning the technology in the U.S. “in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees.”

“These investments will contribute to supplying Europe with much-needed LNG from the U.S. and provide gas for U.S. data center development,” he said. “It’s important that our investments fit with the policies developed by the countries, and that’s what we will do here in the U.S.”

Pouyanné said it’s a matter of “ranking” technologies. Offshore projects are massive projects costing billions of dollars and take a long time to develop, he said, and still make sense in Europe where open land is scarce. TotalEnergies announced an agreement with Google in February to provide 1 GW of solar capacity for the tech company’s Texas data centers.

“At the end of the day in terms of allocation of capital, even if you target reliable and low-carbon energy, it’s better not to invest in [offshore] but to continue to invest in other technologies,” Pouyanné said. “Offshore wind is too expensive from my standpoint. We believe this is a more efficient use of capital in the United States.”

Interior said in its press release that TotalEnergies has pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the U.S.

The agency stopped all offshore development in 2025, citing security concerns that Burgum again brought up during the press conference. TotalEnergies paused its wind farms’ development after the 2024 election, promising to reassess the situation in four years, and quickly came to the conclusion that offshore wind is not the most affordable way to produce electricity in the U.S., Pouyanné said.

He said the company met with Interior in 2025 and proposed to Burgum what he called an “innovated solution” to TotalEnergies’ situation.

“It was a win-win dialogue, and I welcome the fact that Burgum was very pragmatic as well, and why not?” Pouyanné said. “It’s original, a European company proposing to not litigate but to make pragmatic solution.”

News of the agreement, portrayed as the administration’s effort to kill wind farms, first began to spread in the week before CERAWeek.

Salustro was dismissive of the administration’s concerns.

“Winter Storm Fern showed how offshore wind helps keep the lights on and rates down for millions in the Northeast,” he said. “And while security claims have been reviewed and dismissed by multiple federal judges, the Department of the Interior and Department of Defense have repeatedly signed off on projects well before construction began.”

The “political theater” is “meant to obscure the fact that offshore wind capacity is being pulled out of the pipeline when energy prices are skyrocketing, even as other offshore wind projects continue delivering reliable and affordable power to the grid. Paying to remove affordable, homegrown energy out of the equation leaves American consumers struggling to pay their electricity bills,” Salustro said.

The labor and environmental group BlueGreen Alliance also released a statement from Vice President of Federal Affairs Katie Harris.

“Donald Trump truly can’t leave a good thing alone. His never-ending vendetta against offshore wind shows that he either doesn’t understand the affordable energy crisis or that he just doesn’t care,” she said. “Either way, it’s clear he’s never paid his own electricity bill, and he’s determined to raise bills for working people. He’s failed at every other attempt to halt offshore wind development, so now he’s doing what he always does: squandering taxpayer funds to force his own agenda.”