Anticipating a potential Donald Trump win over first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in the presidential race, officials and bureaucrats have spent the last 12 months pushing out as many new regulations as they could concoct and simultaneously working to make the repeal or revision of existing regulations hard to accomplish. The term “Trump-proofing” has gone viral across Washington, DC as a result.
This has been a traditional exercise among outgoing Democrat administrations in recent times. You don’t see nearly as much of it happening when a Republican leaves office since those more conservative presidencies tend to have goals to cut regulations rather than invoking more and more layers of government control.
The energy business is certainly no exception to the 2024 piling on of new rules and exercises in Trump-proofing. Incoming Trump officials like EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will find themselves faced with the most target rich environment imaginable to try to unwind.
One of the most important challenges Burgum must quickly act to resolve is the four year-long de facto suspension of the oil and gas leasing program on federal lands and waters held in place by various means by outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. Haaland’s DOI has avoided holding all but a handful of federal lease sales during the Biden presidency by deploying a variety of delaying tactics even in the face of multiple court orders to resume regular sales in compliance with the Federal Lands Leasing Act.
More recently, Haaland and crew have gone about Trump-proofing these unwarranted delays related to the mandated 5-year offshore leasing plan by claiming the need to conduct a revised environmental review. This is the same tactic used by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to justify the year-long pause in permitting for LNG export infrastructure projects.
The final offshore leasing plan for 2024-2029 published last December envisioned restarting the moribund leasing program in the Gulf of Mexico in 2025. But E&E News reported this week that Interior’s draft environmental review is designed to further delay the first lease sale well into 2026. Haaland and her staff’s Trump-proofing tactic is to delay publication of the final environmental review until next September, with a final Record of Decision tentatively due in January 2026. It’s an incredibly cynical act, but sadly typical of the kinds of tactics deployed at Interior since 2021.
These Biden/Haaland efforts to effectively shut down offshore leasing activity come at a key inflection point in the future of the US oil and gas industry. It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the Shale Revolution in the US onshore has run its course in terms of discovering major new resources at a time when all the big plays have moved out of the drilling boom phase of life into the more stable development phase.
While drillers in the Permian Basin and other major play areas have been able to keep increasing overall production to a steady progression of new all-time highs via more sophisticated drilling and fracking techniques and advancing technologies, these existing plays will eventually peak and move into a gradual decline. An aggressive re-start of the onshore federal leasing program could serve to delay the advent of that decline for years to come.
But the real potential for major new resource discoveries not just in the US, but globally, is in the offshore deep waters. In a new report published December 5, analytics firm Wood Mackenzie says, “The energy transition is moving more slowly than is ideal, and the global economy will rely on oil and gas for decades,” adding, “There are huge volumes of discovered resource scattered around the world that are yet to be developed.”
A strong supply of that discovered resource lies beneath the federal waters of the United States. It is a resource that the country would be foolish to waste regardless of the ideologically-driven goals of the Biden White House, a resource that can play a vital role in maintaining US energy security as this energy transition continues its inevitable path to failure.
A rapid restart of the offshore leasing program is the first step to making that happen. Reversing Haaland’s Trump-proofing folly should be Job One for Doug Burgum.
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