Yeah, but you gotta remember that the saudis “warned” Trump that he better not cut off imports. Skerred yet? Didn’t slick willie lock up a YUGE chunk of Utah that had potential for shale deposits? Is there a key to unlock it? I also seem to remember that somehow the Colorado deposits weren’t at a level that would be profitable yet due to access.
Grand Staircase-Esalante National Monument locked up the largest known deposit of clean coal, not shale oil.
Don’t fret. The gas industry will work overtime, and in silent complicity with the greenies, to continue the demise of coal. The oil industry having now gained the ability to export will now seek to limit imports. The super abundance now coming to market that has been driven in part by abundant and cheap capital and will be coming to an end. Their are better places to invest money than hydrocarbons because they are too abundant.
Limiting imports is a bad bad bad idea. But the domestic producers are going to want a helping hand and they easiest way to get it is to create a little artificial scarcity.
Oil has been here before. In the 80’s the US taxpayer paid to permanently plug oil wells. Then they got the strategic reserves.
They should get nothing. No import restrictions, no tariffs, no credits for not producing, no federal reserves.
Don’t know about the shale deposits, but Sick Willie did lock up the largest rare earth mine in the US by turning it into a Preserve or Park (some such), thus enabling the Chinese to dominate the rare earths market, pushing the cost and availability of magnets sky high at the time and killing the experimental use of magnets in the US.