Domestic oil and gas production has recovered from the pandemic recession to near all-time highs under President Joe Biden despite his campaign pledges to crack down on fossil fuels.
Biden has taken several high-profile actions against fossil fuels, including blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and placing a moratorium on new leases for drilling for oil and gas on public lands.
The moratorium, though, has gotten tied up in courts. And Biden’s legislative efforts to boost clean energy have stalled, while his plans for implementing agency regulations to limit fossil fuel use have been slow to be realized.
The result so far is that Biden has gotten the worst of both worlds: high oil and gasoline prices that have weakened his standing with voters, and expanded production that has provoked liberal environmentalists.
FERC SETS NEW ENVIRONMENTAL HURDLES FOR GAS PIPELINE APPROVALS
Here’s where United States’s fossil fuel production is headed now:
Oil
U.S. crude oil production fell to 9.7 million barrels per day for the month of May 2020, the lowest average since October 2017, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
Eighteen months later, in November 2021, daily production rose by about 2 million barrels over that level.
Oil production is now headed toward all-time highs. EIA projects that production will rise to an average of 12 million barrels per day this year and 12.6 million in 2023, the latter of which would be a record-high rate of production on an annual-average basis.
Natural Gas
Demand for natural gas has ballooned across the globe over the last six months, especially in Europe, causing the domestic natural gas industry to anticipate a big year for profits.
Aggregate production volumes for November also neared pre-pandemic levels, and production was up by 4 billion cubic feet per day in November and December 2021 year over year, according to the Natural Gas Supply Association.
LNG
Down the production line, U.S. liquefied natural gas producers have been operating at peak capacity over the last two months.
U.S. LNG led the world in total exported volumes in the month of December, for the first time, and went on to average 11.2 billion cubic feet per day in January, up more than 7.5% over the daily average for the fourth quarter of 2021.
Gas shortages in Europe and the associated rise in prices across its markets have driven this increase, and worries about disruption to pipeline gas to the continent from Russia are also increasing demand for an alternative in U.S. LNG. EIA expects LNG exports to increase by 16% year over year.
Coal
Total domestic coal production fell steeply in 2020, but the fuel saw a measured recovery in 2021 as coal demand grew — in part due to higher gas prices.
Total production increased by 8% last year versus 2020, although it was still 18% below 2019’s totals.
The industry’s view
The message to the Biden administration from the oil and gas industry, as well as from many congressional Republicans, during this production growth period has more or less been “no thanks to you.”
Industry leaders and lawmakers have consistently criticized the Biden administration’s energy and climate policies, such as those seeking climate-related disclosures from companies and restrictions on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, as kneecapping the domestic industry and preventing them from scaling production back up to meet demand.
“We’ve gone from within a year being energy independent to groveling before OPEC to ask them to increase world supply because our gasoline prices have gone up so much. That is the, so far, legacy of this administration,” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said during a recent Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.
The Biden administration has dismissed that line of argument. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser for energy security at the State Department, said during an energy forum last fall, “The idea that the climate action and energy transition caused a fossil fuel crisis to me has no — that’s a political talking point.”
Hochstein instead attributed the supply-demand gap more to the pace of economic recoveries around the world.
Meanwhile, these fossil fuel production trends and other decisions by the administration, including one to auction off 80 million acres of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas companies, have been a point of special contention between climate hawks and Biden.
Several environmental groups sued the Interior Department over the lease sale and succeeded in January, when Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia threw out the environmental analysis upon which the sale was based.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The lead plaintiff in the suit, Friends of the Earth, has gone further since. The organization helped lead a petition of more than 300 groups urging Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to stop authorizing new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico altogether, putting the administration back in a position of choosing between aggressive climate change policies and supporting domestic fossil fuel production.
