It is no secret that the Biden administration is openly hostile toward American oil and gas production.
Foreign oil is fine, of course. Biden begged countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to increase production to save his political standing when gasoline prices were soaring last summer.
But Biden has it in for domestic production, especially in the brilliantly productive Permian Basin.
The Permian Basin is an expanse of sedimentary reservoirs across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico that are uniquely “stacked” — meaning there are multiple productive oil and gas reservoirs on top of one another. As colorfully explained by geologist David Middleton, “finding stacked plays is like getting a herd of Unicorn ponies for Christmas.”
Unicorn ponies, indeed! The Permian is the single most prolific oil-producing patch in the United States; almost half of all U.S. crude oil production comes from that single region. It is also the second-largest natural gas-producing basin behind the Appalachian Basin. Despite being second best, the Permian still produces about 18 percent of our natural gas.
Notwithstanding repeated claims over the years that the Permian is about to hit peak production (any day now, for real this time!), it just keeps on breaking production records and is projected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and other experts to continue to produce well into the future, practically forever. It is nearly impossible to express just how much oil and gas is down there.
So it’s no wonder that the Biden administration would turn its fiery green eye on this particular part of the American Southwest.
One of the constraints on oil and gas production, especially at a regional scale, is how to move the stuff once it’s out of the ground. After all, you can’t do anything with natural gas if you have nowhere to send it.
There has been some progress on this front, with new export hubs being built on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, but pipelines are one of the special targets of the environmental left, of which Biden and various political appointees in his administration are long-standing members. The Biden administration has withdrawn permits for several pipelines needing federal approval and has simply denied other contenders due consideration.
Should the Biden administration encourage domestic drilling?
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Fortunately, this stuff is a little harder in Texas than it is in other states; most oil and gas operations, including pipelines, are on private or state lands, not federal. The Texas government is also famously ornery when its biggest industry is threatened. The feds can’t stop all the projects going forward in Texas, and there are some projects set to come online soon that will increase natural gas capacity in at least four pipelines.
The assault on the Permian is thus mostly in the form of regulatory harassment.
The Environmental Protection Agency has conducted helicopter flights over the Permian looking for methane “super emitters,” which the agency says are dangerous and need to be addressed urgently, delivering hefty fines and legal penalties to apparent violators. The EPA has imposed stricter rules on methane emissions to harass the industry even more.
It also went after the Permian region over ozone standards, but pushback from Texas forced the EPA to put that avenue of attack on hold — for now.
Most recently, the administration revived a long-standing question about a certain species of lizard that lives in only one place — smack dab in the Permian.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed tossing out years of cooperative efforts — voluntary programs shaped in conjunction with the FWS to both maintain the health of the dunes sagebrush lizard and keep reasonable local oil and gas operations going — by listing the species as endangered.
Conveniently, the lizard’s critical habitat in need of protecting would then be off limits to most human activities, oil and gas production foremost among them. The habitat spans a huge portion of the most productive counties in the Permian.
Karr Ingham, executive vice president of the Texas Alliance of Oil and Gas Producers, said that it is completely unsurprising that the Biden administration is taking a scatter-shot approach to target the Permian Basin.
“If you have an administration that is openly hostile towards a domestic industry, in this case the U.S. oil- and gas-producing industry, you are going to direct that hostility at the one region of the country that accounts for the lion’s share of U.S. production,” Ingham said.
He said it is common for Biden, et al., to make unreasonable demands that lead to “unworkable” delays — such as delays in permitting approval from federal agencies in order to have would-be producers simply give up.
Pending applications for permits to drill have been slowly climbing in number, while approved permits have been declining. As of April, there were 5,025 pending applications for permits to drill on federal leases, and 3,886 of those were in New Mexico alone.
Undeniably, Biden is hostile to the domestic oil and gas industry. Thankfully, most of the Permian is in the state of Texas, which is one of the handful of states actively pushing back against Biden’s suicidal energy policy, and thus has largely been unaffected so far by Biden’s hostility and the administration’s actions.
Still, even the oil and gas industry in Texas is being targeted by executive agencies. It strikes me that it may be because Texas pushes back so much that the Biden administration has special hostility toward it.
If that’s the case, keep it up, Texas! The Permian is a nearly miraculous resource, and production from the 7,000 or so fields there must be permitted.
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