The Interior Department revised down its estimate of the total number of unused federal drilling permits, which the Biden administration used much of last year as a basis to criticize oil and gas producers for not increasing output to reduce high energy prices.

The latest data still show lessees maintain thousands of unused drilling permits on public lands, but the figure is significantly lower than the 9,000-plus figure Biden, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and many other Democrats had used in 2022 when gasoline prices hit a new nominal record to argue the industry was sitting on unused permits to pad profits instead of increasing output on federal lands.

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Interior's Bureau of Land Management puts the total number of approved but unused permits at 6,653 as of February 2023 and said a "reporting discrepancy" was responsible for the revision.

"As of February 2023, companies have over 6,600 approved and unused drilling permits available on federal lands. This number has been updated to account for a reporting discrepancy resulting from a transition to a new database in mid-2020," the bureau said in a statement.

BLM's monthly tab of approved applications for permits to drill, or AAPDs, was first revised substantially downward in December. The bureau included a footnote saying the number was updated to account for the discrepancy.

Before December 2022, the latest month for which BLM had tabbed AAPDs was September, the final month of fiscal 2022. In that report, the number of unused permits was 8,663.

BLM data put the number of unused permits at 9,000 or above for much of fiscal 2022, a figure the administration used to criticize the industry's capital strategies in the face of elevated oil and natural gas prices.

Data for October and November 2022, the first two months of fiscal 2023, are not currently available on BLM's website. The bureau said it does not currently have data for those two months.

Many Republicans and the oil and gas industry generally argued the Biden administration was too restricting of leasing and drilling on federal lands and said it should make more lands available to bring prices down.

Industry jumped at news of the revision to argue for more regular leasing.

“Despite the administration’s inaccurate and misleading numbers, the reality is that the U.S. natural gas and oil industry is confronting the global energy crisis by continuing to work to meet the energy needs of U.S. consumers and our allies abroad," said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute.

Biden authored a pause on all new oil and gas leasing during his first week in office, but the administration later restarted leasing after a federal judge blocked the leasing pause.

Drilling permit approvals, which are a separate process from leasing, continued all the while .

Democratic critics of the industry countered that developers had all they need to increase production. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said companies should "use it or lose it" in reference to federal drilling rights.