Free Republic

The Department of Interior finalized a rule Thursday expanding drilling rights in Utah two years after President Donald Trump reduced the size of a pair of national monuments in the area. Trump cut the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments in 2017, which created a firestorm of criticism from activists who said the president’s decision hurt Native American communities. Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase contain vast amounts of oil, gas and coal, as well as grazing land local ranchers hope to use for cattle. The areas excluded from monuments are protected by federal environmental laws, acting...

America’s energy sources, like booming oil and crumbling coal, have defied projections and historical precedents over the last decade. ... unexpectedly, ... In 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that in 2019, the U.S. would be producing about six million barrels of oil a day. The reality? We're now producing 12 million barrels of oil a day. Meanwhile, EIA projected oil prices would be more than $100 a barrel. They're currently hovering around $60 a barrel. What’s happening: A pair of extraction methods — horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — have unlocked far more oil and gas than experts...

House Democrats introduced sweeping climate legislation Tuesday that would halt fossil fuel production on public lands for at least a year as the nation prepares to drastically cut climate-warming pollution from its own land holdings. The bill from the House Natural Resources Committee requires the Department of the Interior to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions on public lands by 2040. “The Trump administration is handing out drilling and coal mining leases like candy, and no thought is ever given by this administration to the climate change impacts,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) a sponsor of the bill as well as...

Brazil will push to expand oil drilling in its massive “pre-salt” oil and gas area off its coast in spite of growing global concerns about climate change, the country’s energy minister told Reuters on Monday.

Former National Security Council official and Russia expert Fiona Hill on Thursday testified that she heard Russian President Vladimir Putin at a 2011 conference describe American fracking as a "great threat" to Russia, a position he has emphasized ever since. The recollection came out at a point in the impeachment hearing when Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas was asking Hill about Putin's propaganda efforts in the United States, at the center of which is the television channel RT, which pushes anti-fracking messaging. Hill agreed that Russia saw the growth of U.S. fracking as a threat given that it undermines Russia's...

Crude oil production in the U.S. shale patch is seen rising by 49,000 bpd next month to a record-high daily average of 9.133 million barrels. That’s according to the latest edition of the Energy Information Administration’s Drilling Productivity Report. A month earlier, the EIA estimated that total shale oil production will rise by 58,000 bpd in November from October, to 8.971 million bpd. The latest report, however, pegged the November average at more than that: 9.048 million barrels daily.

A surge of oil production is coming, whether the world needs it or not. The flood of crude will arrive even as concerns about climate change are growing and worldwide oil demand is slowing. And it is not coming from the usual producers, but from Brazil, Canada, Norway and Guyana — countries that are either not known for oil or whose production has been lackluster in recent years. The oil-supply outlook is a sharp departure from the early 2000s, when prices soared as producers strained to keep up with ballooning demand in China and some analysts warned that the world...

America’s oil production is booming. The country’s crude oil output is on track to average 12.2 million barrels per day (BPD) this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA). That’s an increase of 1.2 million BPD from 2018’s record output. Because of that gusher of new supply, the country now rivals Saudi Arabia as the global oil kingpin. It even briefly overtook that nation as the leader in crude oil exports earlier this year. With more supply on the way and additional export infrastructure under construction, America is emerging as a dominant force in the oil market. The...

The United States' surging oil and gas production will soon allow the country to surpass Saudi Arabia in liquid petroleum exports. While Saudi Arabia will remain the top crude oil exporter, the U.S. is destined to usurp the kingdom as soon as late 2019 when it comes to overall liquid petroleum exports, including fuels and some natural gas liquids, according to a new report from the Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy. "Increasingly profitable shale production and a robust global appetite for light oil and gasoline is poised to bring the U.S. to a position of oil dominance in the next...

The federal office that protects employees against reprisals for whistleblowing is advocating on behalf of a federal employee in Alaska who complained about the handling of an Arctic offshore lease sale. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel announced .. it’s filing a whistleblower retaliation complaint with the Merit Systems Protection Board on behalf of Jeffrey Missal, a regional environmental officer for the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Missal was fired after filing a complaint with the Interior Department’s inspector general and contending that the department violated environmental regulations to facilitate Arctic oil exploration. ... Missal...

A couple of weeks ago, I noted the green justice advocates were planning to rebrand “climate change” to “climate disaster” in order to gin up hysteria and fear. It turns out two can play that game. In a move that heralds the beginning of the Trump Administration’s election battle with climate change extremists, fossil fuels are getting a vocabulary makeover. Two Department of Energy officials referred on Wednesday to natural gas produced in the US as “freedom gas” and “molecules of U.S. freedom” in a press release announcing the expansion of a natural gas facility in Texas. Increasing export capacity...

The Trump administration moved forward Thursday with its plan to open up more federal land in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast to oil and gas drilling, including fracking. The Bureau of Land Management Central Coast Office released new documents on its proposal for oil and gas leasing and development on the public land it administers. The field office’s boundaries stretch across 11 California counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Merced, Monterey, San Benito, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Stanislaus. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that opposes the plan, estimates that the proposal could...

Somebody is having trouble with the deep state, and this time it’s not President Trump. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy (R) is asking the president for help tackling what he views as entrenched workers in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (yes… I’m serious) who have been working to thwart oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Bet you didn’t see that one coming. (Government Executive) A governor is asking the president to intervene with career federal employees, accusing them of “undermining” the sale of lands that would benefit his state.In a letter to President Trump dated...

The Trump administration failed to adequately consider oil spills, climate change and the welfare of polar bears in its expedited study of proposed drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to comments published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week. The unusually harsh criticism from federal wildlife regulators could deal a blow to one of the most high-profile items in President Donald Trump’s energy agenda, and reflects the pitfalls of the administration’s drive to speed up big projects with quicker, shorter environmental studies. The Interior Department wants to hold its first lease sale of at least 400,000...

It was a fruitful year for the rank and file at oil-and-gas companies, from Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM to Phillips 66. Oil and gas drillers and refiners had some of the highest-paid median workers in the energy and utility sectors in 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal analysis of annual pay disclosures by hundreds of big U.S. companies. Houston-based Phillips 66 paid its median worker $196,407, the highest of any company in the sector. Phillips was followed by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. at $183,445. Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which has roughly 72,600 employees, according to its latest proxy, had the...

U.S. natural gas production set an all-time world record last week despite prices hitting a new annual low and down 85 percent over the last 14 years. After dominating world natural gas production for 50 years, American production peaked in 1972 at about 21.7 trillion cubic feet.  As annual production slumped to about 18 trillion cubic feet for the next 33 years, prices rose from about $0.59 per thousand cubic feet (tcf) to a record high of $18.95 per tcf in September 2005. But thanks to 80-year-old George Mitchell, who pioneered modern hydraulic fracking techniques in the suburbs of Fort Worth...

Trade with Canada and Mexico supports 11 million U.S. jobs, benefiting every state and every corner of the economy. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, manufacturing sales supports jobs in 43,000 U.S. manufacturing firms. Canada and Mexico are top markets for American farmers, buying nearly one-third of U.S. agricultural exports. Now add U.S. energy benefits to the long list of reasons to maintain these critical trade partnerships by approving the U.S.-Mexico-Canada-Agreement. Canada and Mexico are our best energy customers, ranking as the top purchasers for a host of fuels. Canada is the top market for U.S. exports of crude...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the Intercept website collaborated on a seven-minute video that takes place in a future where Democrats control the House, Senate, and White House, and America is fundamentally transformed into a socialist country where fossil fuels are eliminated, everyone is guaranteed a union job, and the Green New Deal saves the planet.....Ocasio-Cortez then profiles Ileana, a “true child of the Green New Deal,” who joins the AmeriCorps to restore wetlands. “Most of her friends were in her union, including some oil workers in transition,” Ocasio-Cortex says. “They took apart old pipelines and got to work planting...

n the first significant check on the Trump administration’s “energy-first” agenda, a US judge has temporarily halted hundreds of drilling projects for failing to take climate change into account. Drilling had been stalled on more than 300,000 acres of public land in Wyoming after it was ruled the Trump administration violated environmental laws by failing to consider greenhouse gas emissions. The federal judge has ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages US public lands and issues leases to the energy industry, to redo its analysis. The decision stems from an environmental lawsuit. WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility,...

Leasing rights on western lands with some of the world’s highest densities of sage grouse were sold this week to energy developers for as little as $2 an acre — the result of a recent Trump administration directive to roll back Obama-era protections for the iconic bird. Thirty-one parcels in Wyoming containing 57,800 acres of prime sage-grouse habitat are among those being auctioned online by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Conservationists call the area the “golden triangle” because of its importance for the species, which has suffered a sharp decline in the past 15 years as oil and gas...