Oil rights secured
Companies beat Biden to the punch on climate
BILLINGS, Mont. — In the closing months of the Trump administration, energy companies stockpiled enough drilling permits for western public lands to keep pumping oil for years and undercut President-elect Joe Biden’s plans to curb new drilling because of climate change, according to public records and industry analysts.
An analysis of government data shows the permit stockpiling has centered on oilrich federal lands in New Mexico and Wyoming. It accelerated during the fall as Biden was cementing his lead over President Trump and peaked in December, aided by speedier permitting approvals since Trump took office.
The goal for companies is to lock in drilling rights on oil and gas leases on vast public lands where they make royalty payments on any resources extracted. Biden wants to end new drilling on those same lands as part of his overhaul of how Americans get energy, with the goal of making the nation carbon neutral by 2050.
Companies submitted more than 3,000 drilling permit applications in a threemonth period that included the election, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Officials approved almost 1,400 drilling applications during that time amidst the pandemic. That’s the highest number of approvals during Trump’s four-year term, according to AP’s analysis.
In Colorado, a dozen permits are approved or pending to drill in Pawnee National Grassland, a birding destination where wildflowers and cactuses bloom below the buttes.
The administration issued more than 4,700 drilling permits in 2020 — comparable to approval numbers from early last decade when oil topped $100 a barrel, roughly twice the current price.
Under Trump, crude production from federal and tribal lands and waters increased sharply, topping a billion barrels in 2019. That was up by almost a third from the last year of the Obama administration.
But this year the coronavirus pandemic and crashing oil prices caused many companies to curtail their activity.
The oil industry’s fear is that Biden will follow through on campaign pledges and make it impossible or much harder to drill on public lands.
“You go from having a champion in the White House, who steers the entire federal apparatus to wanting you to be successful, to someone who is hostile to the industry,” said Tom Pyle, a former Republican aide on Capitol Hill who now leads the industry group American Energy Alliance.
Bureau of Land Management spokesman Chris Tollefson said the agency had streamlined permitting while still following environmental laws.
“Markets, not the BLM, determine how oil and gas developers decide to acquire and develop leases,” he said.