Federal regulators added a month to the clock on bp's seismic survey in the Gulf of America. The National Marine Fisheries Service modified the Letter of Authorization it had issued to bp Exploration and Production Inc. for the incidental take of marine mammals during the survey, pushing the expiration date from August 31, 2026, to October 1, 2026. bp told NMFS the survey had a delayed start and asked for the additional month because of the delay.
What the permit covers
NMFS issued the original authorization to bp on March 1, 2026. It covers a three-dimensional ocean-bottom node and distributed acoustic sensing survey in the Garden Banks and Walker Ridge areas of the Gulf of America, and took effect May 1, 2026. The survey plan itself has not changed: 106 days of sound source operation, split between 69 days in zone 5 and 37 days in zone 7.
The rule behind the permit
The authorization sits under a broader incidental take regulation that lets NMFS approve individual surveys like bp's without a new rulemaking each time. Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, NMFS treats survey noise that could disrupt behavior such as feeding or breeding as harassment, and noise that could injure an animal as a more serious category, and its regulations set the terms for how much of that disturbance operators may cause.
NMFS first adopted the current five-year rule for Gulf of America geophysical surveys in January 2021, then replaced it in 2024 after determining the original take estimates were wrong. In August 2025, NMFS's own Office of Policy asked to reimplement the regulation again so survey coverage would not lapse, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management joined as a co-petitioner that October. NMFS issued a new version of the rule effective April 20, 2026, running through April 19, 2031, without changing the activities it covers, the region, or the mitigation, monitoring and reporting requirements attached to it.
