Gov. Phil Murphy, speaking on the offshore wind energy industry during a fireside chat on all things South Jersey Wednesday, said two data points remain clear:

• Federal administrations come and go;
• The amount of wind off New Jersey’s 140 miles of coastline will remain a constant.

That’s why Murphy said he’s not giving up on one of the key initiatives of his administration.

Murphy, speaking at a Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey event at the Hard Rock Casino in Atlantic City, acknowledged there’s little chance for a revival of offshore wind initiatives before his term expires.

He said he hopes that’s not a forever decision.

“The last thing we should be doing is pulling back on supply,” he said.

Murphy said he hopes his successor — or their successor — will take advantage of the abundance of wind the state has offshore, and that it would be foolish to give up on the idea simply because of political ideology.

The governor compared wind in New Jersey to oil in Texas.

“Let’s imagine a federal administration that said, ‘Hell, no’ to any more oil and gas exploration in America, and you’re the governor of Texas and you’re sitting on gobs of oil and gas reserves,” he said. “That’s not a forever reality, right? Those reserves don’t just go away. They sit there and you probably bide your time.

“I can either try to convince the administration that they need to reconsider, or alternatively, wait them out. That’s what we’re doing with wind. Our 140 miles of Atlantic shoreline is not going away.”

Taking cost considerations for the generation out of the question — and, to be fair, you can’t do that — Murphy said the state was working to address some key issues.

The biggest: Whether the windmills would be visible from the Shore.

Murphy noted the most recent solicitation called for the wind farms to be 35 miles offshore — or well over the horizon.

Murphy, who made clean energy a key part of his administration, made it clear that he’s not backing off.

He noted the potential of EV buses coming to Camden, modular nuclear devices coming to Oyster Creek and solar coming everywhere. He even spoke positively about natural gas.

“We’ve never been, ‘Hell, no’ on natural gas,” he said. “We’ve been very careful to call balls and strikes on all these projects, so that, particularly as a legal matter, somebody can’t come back and say, ‘You short-circuited consideration.’ And I would reiterate that today, I think we’ve been constructive.”

During this current energy crisis, states need to keep an open mind, he said.

“When you’ve got rates going through the roof and you’ve got decisions that are taking some a big chunk of our supply off the table, you have to be, as Barack Obama used to say, about ‘all-of-the-above’ solutions,” he said.

Murphy noted he will sign a solar and battery power storage bill Friday.

“We’re going all of the above,” he said. “Some of this will hit it; some of it won’t.”

He still made it clear he’s a proponent of offshore wind, noting how it could have been an economic boom for the state as the maker of products for the sector, too.

Murphy, however, said those days have passed. For now.

“I’m not optimistic at the moment, I have to be honest with you,” he said. “But we’re sitting on an asset that’s not going away, just like oil and gas in the ground is not going away in Texas.

“We’ll do what we can in the next five months, but it’ll likely be up to successor administrations to capitalize on that.”