Energy Development

This week has been a bad week for President Obama’s policies in the courts. The Supreme Court handed a defeat to President Obama over his immigration plan and a district court struck down his administration’s unlawful attempt for the Bureau of Land Management to regulate hydraulic fracturing. The court’s hydraulic fracturing opinion was straightforward and simple. The court explained to the Obama administration that they cannot do anything they want, but only what they have been...
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America is in the midst of an energy revolution. While coal use has fallen, natural gas and oil production have increased dramatically over the last four years. Conversely, despite massive amounts of subsidies, mandates, and media hype, renewable energy production has hardly budged. Glowing words for renewable energy investment shouldn’t outshine the real story about the market-driven boom in oil and gas production. Data vs. Hype The chart below shows the change in U.S. energy...
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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of the Department of Interior tried this week to put a positive spin on their anemic onshore oil and gas leasing program. Even worse, it took them nearly six months to do it, since the fiscal year 2015 ended at the beginning of last October. Of course, it takes a while to craft a message by massaging numbers and cherry picking data points. In their release , the BLM cites a 10 percent increase in oil production on federal and Indian lands from 2014 to...
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With all the discussion in the media about OPEC, about the Saudis and the Russians, and about the relationship between oil prices and the stock market, there seems to be no discussion about the elephant in the room. The real reason we have low oil prices today is because since 2008, U.S. oil producers – along with some help from Canada – dramatically increased oil production. The U.S. government did nothing to help; in fact, oil production from U.S. federal lands and waters actually...
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Four years ago today, President Obama proclaimed, “we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” Once again, President Obama is on the wrong side of history. In 2012, gasoline was $3.72 per gallon. Today, it is $1.73 a gallon.   What’s changed is a massive increase in world oil production—almost all of which came from the United States. The chart below shows the increase in total world oil production in red and the increase in oil production from the U.S. Nearly 82...
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The Senate is poised to consider broad energy legislation, the first of its kind since 2007. S.2012, the Energy Policy Modernization Act, seeks to address various facets of energy policy, from efficiency standards to power supply and the electric grid. Overall, this bill fails to shepard in significant energy policy reform and instead increases regulation and spending in an effort to fix perceived problems— similar to the 2005 and 2007 energy bills. In reality, few energy issues are...
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On Monday, the House will vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank. Having expired this summer, a band of Representatives summoned a seldom-used parliamentary procedure known as a discharge petition to skirt the usual legislative process and force a vote on the House floor for H.R. 3611 , the Export-Import Bank Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2015. The Ex-Im Bank is the poster-child for corporate welfare and a hallmark of cronyism. Further, the Export-Import bank is used to provide...
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A debate in Washington over the reauthorization of the Land & Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) has brought up the often overlooked topic of federal land management. Many Americans may not know just how much land the US government owns. The federal government owns roughly 643 million acres of surface lands, tens of millions acres more of subsurface lands and 1.76 billion acres in the outer continental shelf (OCS) off our coast. The combined roughly 2.46 billion acres is larger, by comparison,...
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As with any suggestion of a change in the status quo in Washington, my call for the establishment of an Energy & Natural Resources Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives (a position which I have held for over five years) has been met with some reservation. I am happy to continue the dialogue about why this is long overdue and welcome others to join the conversation. Representative Ed Whitfield recently announced plans to retire from Congress at the end of this term. Whitfield, who...
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Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced that he would resign at the end of October. As a result, many in Congress are calling for new leadership to implement procedural changes to the House. For example, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes suggested that a new leadership team should implement new conference rules that would make the chamber more functional. And in a letter to House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Rep. Peter Roskam issued words...
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