The U.S. energy boom brought in $13.4 billion in federal revenue this fiscal year, the Interior Department said Tuesday.
More than half of that money — $7.2 billion — from mining, oil and gas drilling on public and tribal lands goes to the Treasury. States collected $2.2 billion, an increase of about $200 million over the previous year. And Native American tribes, who collect all the revenue from energy development on their land, for the first time took in more than $1 billion.
“This year’s disbursements continue to reflect significant energy production from public and tribal lands in the United States,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said.
Wyoming was the top recipient, collecting $1 billion. New Mexico followed with $579 million, and Utah took in the third-most with $171 million.
While the revenue is an increase, Republicans are expected to push the Obama administration to open more federal lands to drilling and mining when the GOP takes over the Senate in January.
They will seek to send more money to Interior to process federal mining permits, open the Atlantic Ocean to offshore drilling and push back against an expected final Interior rule governing hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on federal lands.
That fracking rule has been delayed several times, but is scheduled for release next year. Fracking, a drilling method that has sparked the U.S. energy boom, injects a high-pressure cocktail of water, sand and chemicals into tight-rock formations to access hydrocarbons.
While industry groups say the practice is safe, public health and environmental groups have raised concerns that it might pollute drinking water. The anticipated Interior regulation would set requirements for managing the water that flows back after fracking the well, for reducing leaks of the heat-trapping methane gas, and for disclosing chemicals used in the process.
The Obama administration and Republicans might agree, however, on restarting drilling in the Atlantic Ocean. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management earlier this year allowed limited use of a type of sonar testing, over the objection of environmentalists, that is seen as a precursor to allowing oil and gas drilling there.
The White House is formulating a five-year offshore drilling plan that would begin in 2017. It initially planned to allow drilling in the Atlantic Ocean when forming the last plan in 2010, but shelved the effort following the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 people and spilled about 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
