(Reuters) – President Joe Biden is set to ban new offshore oil and gas development across 625 million acres (250 million hectares) of U.S. coastal territory, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

The ban, to be announced on Monday, rules out the sale of drilling rights in stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, said the report, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.

Biden is leaving the possibility open for new oil and leasing in the central and western areas of the Gulf of Mexico, which account for around 14% of the nation’s production of these fuels, the report said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside of business hours.

The ban would solidify Biden’s legacy on addressing climate change and his goal to decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2050.

The New York Times (NYSE:) reported that a section of the law Biden’s decision relies on, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, gives a president wide leeway to bar drilling and does not include language that would allow President-elect Donald Trump or other future presidents to revoke the ban.

Biden, Trump and Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, all used the law to ban sales of offshore drilling rights in some coastal areas.

Trump tried in 2017 to reverse Arctic and Atlantic Ocean withdrawals Obama had made at the end of his presidency, but a federal judge ruled in 2019 that the law does not give presidents the legal authority to overturn prior bans.

(Reuters) – Russian rescue workers have cleared more than 86,000 metric tons of contaminated sand and earth on either side of the Kerch Strait following an oil spill in the Black Sea last month, the emergencies ministry said on Saturday.

The oil leaked from two ageing tankers that were hit by a storm on Dec. 15. One sank and the other ran aground.

More than 10,000 people have been working to shovel up viscous, foul-smelling fuel oil from sandy beaches in and around Anapa, a popular summer resort. Environmental groups have reported deaths of dolphins, porpoises and sea birds.

The emergencies ministry said on the Telegram messaging app that oil-tainted soil had been collected in the broader Kuban region in Russia and in Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Kyiv in 2014.

The ministry published video footage showing dozens of workers in protective suits loading bags of dirt onto diggers and others skimming dirt off the sand with shovels.

Russia’s transport ministry said this week experts had established that about 2,400 metric tons of oil products had spilled into the sea, a smaller spill than initially feared.

When the disaster struck, state media reported that the stricken tankers, both more than 50-years old, were carrying some 9,200 metric tons (62,000 barrels) of oil products in total.

The spill involved heavy M100-grade fuel oil that solidifies at a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) and, unlike other oil products, does not float to the surface but sinks to the bottom or remains suspended in the water column.