Former President Donald Trump has employed “Drill, Baby, Drill” as a rallying cry against the Biden administration’s environmental policies.
Skeptics, though, have noted that the production of oil and gas has hit record highs under the Biden administration.
Still, in his campaign platform, the GOP presidential nominee has proposed to end delays in federal drilling permits, promised to “remove all red tape” surrounding oil and natural gas projects, and separately vowed to commit to slashing energy prices by more than half.
And a second Trump administration could be better equipped to handle the legal and bureaucratic hurdles to expanding oil and gas drilling. Plus, a more conservative legal landscape could be sympathetic to Trump’s priorities.
Drilling possibilities
The executive branch has little control over the day-to-day production of oil because the majority of production is on private lands. Federal lands accounted for just 11% of all oil production and 9% of natural gas production in fiscal 2022, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
But there are some areas ripe for drilling under a second Trump administration, according to industry experts who spoke with the Washington Examiner.
One would be in Alaska, where the Biden administration has sought to restrict new oil and gas leasing on 13 million acres of a petroleum reserve in an effort to protect wildlife.
In June, Trump pledged to restart drilling in the separate Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a meeting with Senate Republicans. His administration had lifted a 40-year moratorium on energy development in the area and held one lease sale, covering nearly 438,000 total acres and yielding $14.4 million in bids. But the sale generated a fraction of what it was expected to raise, and only three bidders stepped up to the auction as the pandemic led to a global recession and a steep decline in oil prices.
The rest of the leases were paused and canceled under President Joe Biden’s tenure.
“That’s completely detrimental to the people of Alaska,” said Jason Isaac, the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, which represents energy producers. “It’s energy-rich, and they should be prospering from that abundance that they have, but there’s just been a complete target on that particular state.”
The current administration’s move to pause leases in ANWR came after it approved the nearby ConocoPhillips’s oil drilling Willow Project, prompting pushback from environmental groups, which argued the move was a step backward for the country’s climate goals.
In May, the Bureau of Land Management announced it would end future coal leases from being approved in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the largest coal-producing region in the United States. Isaac mentioned that a second Trump administration could look to this region for further drilling, along with other Western states that are “energy-rich” and where the current administration is looking to limit further mining.
Still, coal is on a steep decline in the U.S. Another Trump term could prolong its use but is unlikely to revive the industry.
In contrast to federal lands, waters and submerged lands of the Outer Continental Shelf are entirely owned by the federal government, giving it complete control of offshore drilling and wind generation. Experts told the Washington Examiner another Trump administration would likely grant a more aggressive five-year offshore drilling plan than the Biden administration, which issued a historically low number of auctions in the program.
Legal challenges
Still, past attempts to open up lands and waters for drilling illustrate the legal hurdles a Trump Interior Department would face a second time around.
In 2017, Trump issued an executive order aimed at expanding offshore drilling and reversing the Obama administration’s efforts to withdraw Outer Continental Shelf areas from oil and gas leasing.
However, environmentalist groups successfully won a legal challenge against Trump’s revocation, setting the stage for other green groups to challenge the president through the judiciary with hundreds of lawsuits. More than 260 were filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, and the group won nine out of 10 resolved cases, according to its website.
“It’ll be like Whack-a-Mole if he’s reelected because they will push everywhere, all the time, all at once,” said Brett Hartl, the government affairs director for the group. “I think they’re going to be pushing in many places — many of which have really important wildlife, cultural, recreational values, that they just don’t seem to have any interest in preserving.”
During Trump’s first term, the agency had visions of a more expansive five-year oil and gas plan but faced limits imposed by the judiciary in response to litigation by environmental groups.
“The Trump administration tried to write a very expansive five-year oil and gas leasing plan and ran into legal trouble early on and never finished the job,” said Kevin Book, a managing director of ClearView Energy Partners. “Some of these things are easier said than done. It’s a question of how far they will go if they have an opportunity to do it again, and our suspicion is that they will try to be expansive but within the limits established by federal judges.”
The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations, makes it difficult to roll back policies without providing a strong justification. Any efforts by Trump officials to reverse Biden administration rules would have to clear that bar.
“This happened during the first Trump term — the administration came in with a combination of rewrites and [overturns] — essentially the two deregulatory protocols at a very high level,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The first Trump administration pursued a combination of the two, and they got snagged on process in a number of places.”
But it may be easier the second time around if a second Trump administration were to learn from its mistakes. Furthermore, a more right-leaning judiciary could be more sympathetic than during his first term.
Some Biden rules may be harder than others to roll back, as many are statutory. For example, rules boosting costs to drill on public lands were embedded within the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 climate and healthcare spending bill passed by Democrats and signed by Biden.
Market signals
Although the executive branch may not have much impact on near-term production, regulations under the Biden administration can affect future investment by sending signals to the market about where drilling is and isn’t available — and can scare investment away if there are burdensome regulatory costs. Furthermore, policy uncertainty can freeze or deter investment.
The Biden administration has tried to steer the nation away from reliance on fossil fuels with rules meant to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles and regulations to limit emissions from power plants.
For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has introduced rules to slash methane pollution from oil and natural gas projects, proposing a methane fee that would charge producers for every metric ton released past established regulations. Book noted that such proposals could deter investment from smaller producers who have less capital to spend to adhere to the regulations.
“Look, words also matter — and we think that a president, be it from either party, should take every opportunity to speak clearly about the value proposition of continued U.S. oil and gas production,” said Dustin Meyer, the senior vice president of policy at the American Petroleum Institute.
A possible Harris administration, at the very least, could continue in the same direction as her Democratic predecessor and allow for some semblance of policy stability. If Vice President Kamala Harris were to win the White House, she would be in a position to defend Biden’s energy regulations and finalize major parts of the Democrats’ climate bill, while another Trump term would mean a swing in the other direction.
“Her most important energy policy contribution, from our perspective, is not anything specific to what we’ve seen so far, but rather that she would provide regulatory continuity by continuing the programs undertaken by the Biden administration,” Book said.
Permitting reform
Energy experts who spoke with the Washington Examiner stressed that regardless of who is in the White House, permitting reform is necessary to boost any form of energy production on any land. A bipartisan proposal has been introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY) that would streamline fossil fuel and renewable energy projects. Several industry players have pointed to the proposal as an opportunity to speed up projects that have faced bureaucratic and legal hurdles for approval, but it faces an uphill battle in Congress.
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However, it’s unclear whether a future Harris or Trump administration would support the proposal. While a Trump campaign spokesperson stated the Republican nominee would “end the Harris-Biden Administration’s delays in federal drilling permits and leases that are needed to unleash American oil and natural gas production,” the spokesperson did not speak specifically about the Senate proposal.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on her position regarding the Manchin-Barrasso proposal.