Biden ending moratorium on federal drilling leases won’t help gas prices for ‘over a year’: Oil expe

https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/...ng-wont-help-gas-prices-for-over-a-year-lipow

while I think it’s great he’s somewhat reversing course I hope he does a bit more. But this is a step in the right direction. I also would like to see the pipe line open back up. Stuff like this will help tremendously in a year or two. Back to cheap oil. That would be great.

 

It's a good political move to woo moderates, but in reality they're not drilling because they want to keep the price elevated, not because they don't have places to drill.

 

That’s not the case. That’s just the democrat talking points. Where are the leases they’re supposedly sitting on? They won’t tell you that because in some areas the price per barrel doesn’t allow them to drill until it’s super high.

 

RumpelstiltsBrandon must have woken up and seen his approval numbers last week...

 

The pipeline is a non-issue. Not only would it take even longer to be ready, but it would have no effect whatsoever on capacity and global oil and gas prices. The professionally dishonest right-wing politicians and media talking heads really should shut up about it.

 

Mostly New Mexico and Wyoming for federal and tribal lands:

FY 2022 APD Status Report December.pdf (blm.gov)

Fact-check on 9,000 unused drilling permits | verifythis.com

"Only about 10% of domestic oil and gas drilling occurs on federal land. The rest happens on private and state property, Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston, said. At the end of 2021, there were 9,173 approved applications for drilling permits on federal and tribal lands, according to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Jennifer Pett with the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), which represents independent oil and natural gas producers, told VERIFY that more than 9,000 approved permits aren’t producing oil and gas right now. Joshua Axelrod with the National Resources Defense Council also confirmed that more than 9,000 approved permits are unused.

However, that doesn’t mean oil companies could just start drilling right now and produce oil and gas.

According to the IPAA, some of these leases are going through a “complex regulatory process or are held up in litigation.” Western Energy Alliance, which represents hundreds of companies involved in the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, says on its website that it is defending more than 2,200 leases in court, most of which cannot be developed while the cases are ongoing.

Hirs explained that a variety of factors can halt the oil drilling process for unused permits.

“Federal leases…are subject to environmental studies. They're also subject to lawsuits filed by neighbors, by municipalities, by counties and state governments. And so it's become a more arduous process,” he said.

Companies often need to have separate permits secured for multiple well sites before they can bring in an oil rig, the IPAA says. But just because the government approves the permits doesn’t guarantee the well will produce oil and gas, as some never do. This means approved permits may go unused.

“If you've gone, like most companies do, and filed a dozen or two dozen [permits] at a time, and your first well turns out to be a dry hole, you're not going to go ahead and drill the rest of those,” Hirs said.

It’s true that companies will sometimes sit on unused permits until it makes more financial sense. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that since there isn’t a penalty for not using a drilling permit, some companies wait to begin drilling until oil prices are high enough to make it worth their while. One operator told the GAO that they would add a drilling rig if the price of oil increases and may suspend one if it decreases. Another said a permit may go unused if oil and gas prices are too low for them to turn a profit.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose challenges for oil companies, too. Some are facing a six-month waiting period for piping materials needed to drill and are still short-staffed after layoffs spurred by the pandemic-induced drop in demand for oil, Pett said. "

PolitiFact: Biden right oil industry has over 9,000 permits to drill (statesman.com)

"
How oil drilling in Biden’s first year compares to Trump
Biden has a point that the U.S. produced more during his first year than Trump’s first year.

During Biden’s first year in office, the U.S. produced an average of about 11 million barrels of crude oil per day compared to Trump’s 9 million barrels per day in his first year. The average barrels of crude oil produced per day spiked during Trump’s subsequent years, swelling to almost 12.3 million in 2019.

U.S. Energy Information Administration in January forecasted that U.S. oil production will average 12.4 million barrels per day during 2023, surpassing the record high for domestic crude oil production set in 2019.

Our ruling
Biden said the oil industry has "9,000 permits to drill now. They could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year."

Biden’s number is correct: There are 9,137 approved permits to drill on federal and Indian land, and the oil industry could use those permits and drill. However, once the permit is approved, drilling doesn’t start overnight. Some companies choose not to drill for corporate reasons — because they can raise funds from investors by not drilling on leases with proven reserves.

Having thousands of unused drilling permits is not something that is unique to Biden’s tenure.

We rate this statement Mostly True.
"

Both Sides Spin Domestic Oil Production - FactCheck.org

"
There were 9,173 approved and available permits for federal land by the end of 2021, but that’s not unusual, nor is it a quick process to start production on them.

The industry has said the Biden administration is “misusing the facts,” by ignoring the still-lengthy process to drill on those permits, and, along with some Republican lawmakers, has countered that the Biden administration’s policies have hurt production, pointing to a pause in new leasing of federal land and water (which was then blocked by the courts) and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. On CNN’s “State of the Union” on March 13, Republican Sen. Rob Portman charged that such actions are “leading to less North American energy production.”

“Both sides have some truth and some misstatements or exaggerations,” Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative and a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told us in an email. “I’m disappointed to see both sides arguing about this. US oil and gas can be helpful, but not instantly, and Biden’s slowing of federal leasing is a SMALL issue for producers, and has made no difference at all in what is being produced today.”

Keystone XL would have delivered Canadian oil, ultimately to Gulf Coast refineries, and “wouldn’t have been online by now under any circumstances,” Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis and a co-founder of the Oil Price Information Service, told us last month.

The recent price of oil, meanwhile, “doesn’t really have much to do with US crude production,” Kloza told us in an email. When he sent us that message on March 15, crude oil prices had dropped from the previous week because “the market overestimated how much Russian crude was impeded, and it underestimated the zero tolerance policy of the Chinese for COVID outbreaks.” New lockdowns in China due to an omicron variant surge could reduce global demand for fuel, as the country is the largest importer of oil in the world.
"

emphasis mine

 

They're not drilling more because of the flood of law suits by environmental organizations

 

Brandon...literally nothing he's done since being in office has worked

 

yep, the truth is, they will only lower prices when the supply of foreign oil increases, and they are forced too

 

Some of these leases are never intended to be drilled from the day they were acquired. It is a way to inflate the asset side of the balance sheet. That is a weird market. I have read of people who don't even have oil companies buying them and sitting on them as a spec investment hoping they can resell the leases at some point in the future as well. Since they sell for so little, they can afford to hold them until someone looking to drill or wanting to pad their books comes along.

 

Our oil companies need to start getting into the Venezuelan oil market ASAP. They have the worlds largest known oil reserves sitting down there going untapped.