US offshore energy boss says climate crisis is opportunity

Bloomberg

The US government is moving urgently to nurture new offshore wind and carbon storage industries despite some economic hurdles, according to the nation’s newly minted ocean energy regulator.
The tasks of overseeing the buildout of those nascent industries falls to Liz Klein, an environmental lawyer and clean energy champion just appointed director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Klein takes over at a critical time, as her agency makes decisions about where to install ocean wind farms, how to safely store carbon dioxide under the sea floor and the future of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The president has been clear that we are in a climate crisis, we have a responsibility as the federal government to do something about that and we can turn that into an opportunity to transition to cleaner sources of energy,” Klein told Bloomberg in her first interview in the new role. At the same time, the focus will be on doing it in a “way that really supports communities” while tapping American smarts and
innovation, she added.
Those opportunities converge in the Gulf of Mexico. The bureau is on track to sell the first-ever offshore wind development rights in the Gulf later this year.