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Last week was Spring Break, which means extra time with the kids and a chance to see the world again with their innocence and curiosity. Our girls have more toys than they need, and the pattern is always the same. Once the excitement of receiving fades (a few minutes), they set it aside and spend the next three hours playing with the cardboard box it came in. Eventually you wonder: can I return the toy and just keep the box?
TotalEnergies just pulled that off. On March 23, Total and Interior signed settlement agreements to unwind the company’s New York Bight and Carolina Long Bay offshore wind leases. Interior will reimburse $795 million for OCS-A 0538 and $133 million for OCS-A 0545, roughly $928 million, after Total reinvests matching capital into Rio Grande LNG Trains 1 through 4 and upstream oil and gas. Total also pledged not to pursue any new U.S. offshore wind. The returned toy: about 4 GW of prospective capacity, roughly 13% of the Biden-era 30 GW target.
The box, of course, was already in hand. Total took FID on Rio Grande Train 4 in September 2025. Trains 1 through 3 were under construction. The deal reimburses Total for capital it was deploying anyway, with the bonus of exiting leases whose economics had soured. Pouyanné called it “a more efficient use of capital.” Hard to argue when the capital was already being spent.
But the language is what lingers. TotalEnergies’s press release quoted Pouyanné stating the company made this deal “considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest” and that its own “studies on these leases have shown that offshore wind developments in the United States, unlike those in Europe, are costly.” But given the open opposition to offshore wind from the federal government and invocation of “national interest” in the release, this reads as much as a loyalty oath as is does a write-down announcement.
The real question is who lines up next at the returns counter. EDPR, RWE and BP had already halted or exited U.S. wind before this deal landed, and we don’t include much offshore wind in our capacity forecasts. Now that Total has established how to get a refund, it could get busy at the service counter.
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