Equinor nearing pulling the plug on Empire Wind project off LI

Equinor is perhaps just days away from pulling the plug on Empire Wind, the $7 billion-plus offshore wind farm planned off Long Island’s South Shore, just weeks after the Trump administration issued a stop-work order for the project.

Norway-based Equinor’s top U.S. wind official, Molly Morris, has been working behind the scenes ever since to determine specifically why the federal government put a halt to the project and to emphasize the freeze’s real-life impacts on U.S. jobs and the economy.

In a phone interview Monday, Morris, president of Equinor Wind U.S., called the situation "urgent and unsustainable," noting the company is spending upward of $50 million a week while nearly a dozen offshore vessels and workers remain idle.

"If no material progress is made within days, Equinor will be forced to terminate the project," she said. "Every day of uncertainty is extremely expensive."

Spokespersons for the Department of the Interior and its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum met with top officials at National Grid last week in Brooklyn. Equinor officials requested a meeting at Empire’s South Brooklyn Marine Terminal operations center, but Burgum couldn’t change his "full" schedule, Morris said.

National Grid, meanwhile, was "honored to accommodate the request of the Department of the Interior and tour Secretary Burgum at our facilities to learn more about the energy systems in New York and the needs of our customers," National Grid spokeswoman Wendy Frigeria said in an email. 

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump called for a broad review of wind-energy permits and leasing, while easing the way for fossil-fuel energy. Even Caithness II, a mothballed natural gas power plant once planned for Yaphank, is being eyed for revival for a Brookhaven National Laboratory data center, with up to 1,000 megawatts of power. 

Morris said frustrations at Equinor have been heightened because the federal government has declined to specify what about the Empire project led to the stop-work order.

"It’s difficult for me to know what the concerns are," she said, pointing only to a single published document from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that "says our permits were rushed through ... We have asked for [details] in writing and have been told it’s not available for distribution, only for internal use."

She added, "You can imagine it's very frustrating for us that our project has been stopped for review of our permit yet we’ve never been told what the challenges are with the permit, nor have we been given an opportunity to fix them." 

Newsday has reported Equinor was on the verge of beginning offshore work 14 miles from the coast of Long Beach when Burgum announced his order, with plans to dump massive rock layers in a 66-foot radius around each of 54 planned wind arrays.

Next, Equinor planned to drive giant monopiles deep into the seabed using a massive hammer with thousands of blows per monopile, with known impacts on sea mammals and other species. Equinor said it has built protections into its process to lessen the impacts, but even some otherwise supportive environmental groups have raised concerns about the company’s switch from a prior plan to drop massive concrete foundations onto the seafloor instead of pile-driven monopiles.

The Empire 1 and 2 projects, while they have won support in New York City, drew protests on Long Island, where some Long Beach residents opposed a former plan to run cables through city streets and an opposition group, Protect Our Coast LI, NY, opposes the turbine placement. Even local politicians, who are largely in support of a different project, Sunrise Wind, which has begun offshore work at Smith Point, showed mixed support for Empire.

Asked if Equinor could have done better winning support, she said, "We are a company with great integrity in honoring and following the law and what is required of us," while pointing to the "significant support in Brooklyn and New York City. We continue to have strong supporters there."

Equinor has invested about $2.7 billion in Empire Wind, even as it continues to hold massive investments in oil and natural gas in the United States. Morris noted the company has "over 100 oil and gas leases in the Gulf of America," the water body known as the Gulf of Mexico before being renamed by Trump, and that the company has invested more than $60 billion in total in the United States since 2000.

Morris noted Empire Wind could create more than 4,000 jobs over the planned 30-year lifetime of the project, which was supposed to start delivering energy by late 2026. There are also seven new U.S.-flagged vessels being built in support of construction, including one nearing completion in Louisiana this month to serve as Empire’s service operations vessel.

"Jobs are at risk," Morris said.

"This is bigger than offshore wind and the offshore wind industry," she said. "This is about lawfully permitted projects under construction being stopped. It’s about honoring contracts and financial investments made in the U.S."

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.