For centuries, Georges Bank—an area of elevated seafloor extending from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia—had served as a an important fishery and trawling grounds, home to scallop, lobster, cod, and more. In the mid- 1970s, however, this area was evaluated for another kind of resource: oil and gas.
At the center of each of these 1976 maps of Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals, a red crosshair marks the “C.O.S.T. EXISTING EXPLORATORY HOLE.” The C.O.S.T. well—short for “Continental Offshore Stratigraphic Test”—aimed to discover oil and gas among the existing resources of Georges Bank and the Nantucket Shoals. Between 1977 and 1982, petrochemical companies including Exxon, Mobil, and Shell would drill nine more exploratory wells throughout Georges Bank. By 1979, the U.S. Department of Interior had accepted over $800 million in bids for 63 “Potential petroleum lease” sites on this map, marked by the red dots inside black squares. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that up to 2.4 billion barrels of oil and 12.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas might exist in Georges Bank, but the exploratory drilling never turned up a single hydrocarbon. In 1998, an executive order banned the leasing of these waters entirely.