The Interior Department announced Tuesday that oil production on federal lands eclipsed the 1 billion barrel mark in fiscal 2019, which amounted to a 29% increase from the end of the Obama administration.
The hydraulic fracturing boom that started in 2009 has ramped up over the last few years, driven by the Trump administration’s regulation rollback and easing of rules dictating how federal lands can be used.
“You have to create an environment where folks want to bid on leases and then go develop them,” acting Assistant Secretary of the Interior Casey Hammond said about the milestone. “One thing we can do as regulators is give people some assurances we’re going to work through the process in a fair and efficient way.”
It now takes the Bureau of Land Management 108 days on average to approve drilling applications, according to federal officials, which is down from the 257 days it took during former President Barack Obama’s final year.
This increased production on federal lands is significant enough to give the United States a large enough stake in the international oil market to keep OPEC from bullying over prices, Sarp Ozkan, director of energy analysis at the data firm Enverus, told the Associated Press.
Not everyone viewed the recent milestone in a positive light.
“Instead of announcing how much land has been preserved or how much our climate emissions have gone down, this president only brags about how much oil is being pumped out of our public lands on his watch,” House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva told the Hill. These numbers are not making our energy supply more sustainable — they’re just padding Big Oil’s bottom line.”
American energy independence has been a goal of President Trump’s dating back to before he announced his intention to run for president.
“The United States is now the No. 1 energy producer anywhere in the world by far,” Trump said during a speech in September.
“For the first time in more than 60 years, this just happened: We are now a net exporter of American natural gas. And we are ending decades of foreign energy reliance to unleash the blessings of American energy independence. We used to get everything there, and now, it’s a whole different story. We are very energy independent,” he said.
