Now that Democrats have recaptured the House, energy production on public lands in the American West is likely to come under increased scrutiny. But it’s hard to see what anyone would gain from slowing down an oil and gas leasing program that’s become a growth engine for the nation’s economy and is having a huge positive impact on job creation.
If you want to understand the importance of the Trump administration’s decision to ease restrictions on issuing leases for drilling on public lands, a good place to start is with the need for natural gas, a fuel that is more plentiful than oil and burns much more cleanly. From an environmental point of view, the increased use of natural gas has driven down U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide from the electric power sector to a 20-year low by substituting for carbon-rich coal.
Last year, U.S. production of natural gas broke all-time records, reaching 33.4 trillion cubic feet. Nearly a quarter of the gas is produced in Texas, with increasing amounts coming from Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. The Western states are blessed with substantial reserves of natural gas, and it would be nothing short of folly not to extract those resources.
If we can’t take advantage of our natural gas resources, we must rely on imports. Consider that as recently as 2007 the U.S. was spending billions of dollars a year to buy liquefied natural gas from foreign countries. Now the U.S. is significantly more energy secure, and we’re able to export liquefied natural gas to buyers around the world, thanks to the growth in gas production that’s been made possible by the shale revolution and made-in-the-USA extraction technologies such as fracking and directional drilling.
During the past year, the Trump administration has made sweeping changes to speed up oil and gas leasing on public lands, expediting environmental reviews and approvals and allowing drilling and mining to take place on millions of acres that had formerly been off-limits to companies, while scaling back restrictive prohibitions against drilling in places inhabited by threatened species like the sage grouse and mule deer.
Environmental groups understandably stress safety and environmental concerns about the placement of drilling rigs, and the siting of oil and gas pipelines. But such concerns always need to be balanced against economic factors and the excellent safety record going back decades for fracking for oil and natural gas. Coloradoans recognized this when they voted on Election Day to reject an anti-fracking proposal that would have widened the setback corridors where fracking is banned and placed millions of acres of land off-limits to oil and gas production.
It’s important to understand that developing our energy resources and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive. Technological innovations have made it possible to drill for oil and gas in new parts of the country, funneling billions of dollars and thousands of jobs into local economies.
For a region whose economic prospects have been written off so many times, the American West is doing surprisingly well, and its future prospects seem even brighter — if oil and gas resources are safely extracted and not kept in the ground at the demand of environmentalists who want to see the oil and gas leasing program killed.
Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.
