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President Donald Trump’s administration is rescinding proposed rules for hydraulic fracturing and other oil- and gas-drilling practices on government lands. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced Thursday the rescission would take effect Friday. The rules developed under President Barack Obama would have applied to drilling on federal lands located mainly in the West. They were set to take effect in 2015 but a judge in Wyoming sided with petroleum industry groups and blocked them at the last minute. …

During her nearly four years as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell said, oil companies did not pressure her about opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. Politicians, however, were a different story. Jewell says she heard about the issue repeatedly from Alaska’s governor and members of Congress, who were worried about a state budget crisis amid plummeting oil prices and declining local production. The state of Alaska, which lacks a sales tax and an income tax, relies on oil revenues to pay for the vast majority of its state budget, as well as fund...

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The Trump administration is preparing to unveil as soon as this week expansive offshore oil plan that would open the door to selling new drilling rights in Atlantic waters, according to people familiar with the plan… President Donald Trump his Interior Department to write the new blueprint with the aim of auctioning oil and gas drilling rights off the U.S. East Coast -- territory that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had had had had ruled out..” Don’t get me wrong! Cheaper energy and greater energy independence for our nation are nothing to sneeze at! But many of us familiar...

On Monday, President Trump announced his plan to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent, while also cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half, a move that could open up Utah to more oil and gas drilling. More than 90 percent of the Bears Ears territory is thought to overlap with oil, gas and coal reserves, according to Bloomberg. Last year, EOG Resources, a prominent shale producer that is well-known in other shale basins, such as the Permian, is one of the few companies chomping at the bit in Utah. Last year, the shale driller won an approval from...

Almost no matter what you build in Western Pennsylvania, you have to consider the possibility that in previous generations the site had been mined for coal. That’s especially true for the next leg of the Southern Expressway, a 13-mile, $700 million section being built along part of the Pittsburgh coal seam between Route 22 and Interstate 79 in western Allegheny and northern Washington counties. In the area around McDonald alone, where the highway will pass over Route 980 just outside the borough, at least 10 mines operated within two square miles between the mid-1860s and mid-1930s. Particularly in Western Pennsylvania,...

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said it is “no surprise” that Republicans are trying to permit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, calling the President Trump’s cabinet “the Big Oil all-star team.” Markey led an effort to oppose any attempts to allow oil drilling in the as part of the fiscal year 2018 federal budget. The Senate passed a budget on Thursday that could pave the way for drilling in the refuge since it requests that the Energy and Natural Resources Committee craft a bill intended to raise $1 billion in revenue over the next decade from oil drilling....

The Senate Budget Committee unveiled a 2018 budget blueprint on Friday that would open the door for a $1.5 trillion tax cut, even as an independent analysis concluded that the plan as offered would far exceed that price tag and overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the rich. The budget resolution could also pave the way to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling, a hot-button Republican proposal that has languished for decades.

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON, July 13 (Reuters) – Eni US will become the first energy company allowed to explore for oil in federal waters off Alaska since 2015 after the Trump administration this week approved a drilling plan on leases the company has been sitting on for 10 years. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved the drilling plan of Eni US, a unit of Italy’s Eni on Wednesday as part of President Donald Trump’s plan to boost oil and gas drilling and make the country “energy dominant.”

<p>Bloomberg) — Mexico’s decision to allow private companies to explore for oil and gas started to pay off after the discovery of at least a billion barrels in a new offshore field.</p> <p>A consortium of Premier Oil Plc, Sierra Oil & Gas S de RL de CV and Talos Energy LLC made the discovery in the shallow waters of the southern Gulf of Mexico just two years after winning the exploration license. It’s the first new find by a private company in the country in almost 80 years, according to consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd., possible only after the government ended the monopoly of state-run Petroleos Mexicanos.</p>

The executive order President Donald Trump signed Friday could ease offshore oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and possibly lead to oil exploration in new marine sanctuaries, including some off the California and Florida coasts. “We are opening it up,” said Trump, referring to the administration’s plan to allow oil exploration in the Arctic Ocean, which President Barack Obama had declared off limits. Trump’s order, known as the America-First Offshore Energy Strategy, directs the Interior Department to review the current five-year oil exploration plan on the Outer Continental Shelf as well as the permitting process for development of...

President Trump on Friday is expected to sign an executive order that could open large parts of the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans to new oil and gas drilling, a prospect that elicited a fierce backlash in California and elsewhere even before details of the order were clear. The move, which is certain to face legal and political challenges, could undo a plan finalized late in President Obama’s second term that sought to limit fossil fuel development and fight climate change by not including new drilling leases off the coast of California or Alaska during the current five-year federal offshore...

The White House is readying an executive order that aims to open up new areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans to offshore oil and gas drilling, according to multiple individuals briefed on the proposal. The White House is considering issuing instructions to the Interior Department to reverse President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of hundreds of millions of offshore acres from future drilling in December 2016. The executive order -- which could come out in the next few weeks -- represents President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to promote domestic energy exploration by rolling back restrictions put in place by previous administrations,...

A Saudi logistics company has just opened a Houston office to seize the opportunity to ship increased volumes of oilfield and plant construction equipment to the Port of Houston as the Texas and U.S. drilling activity is gaining momentum. Bahri Logistics – which had opened its U.S. headquarters in Baltimore back in 1992 – is now opening an office in Houston to take advantage of expected higher demand for oilfield equipment, called breakbulk cargo in the shipping industry: these are large items that need to be loaded and shipped individually rather than in containers. Bahri, or the National Shipping Company...

The dynamics of the oil industry have changed dramatically since the beginning of 2010. Because of the U.S. shale revolution, the U.S. is now a country with oil production rivaling that of Saudi Arabia and Russia. The fundamental shift in oil power has come as a direct result of investment in the technology of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of tight oil formations in the U.S. In 2010, U.S. production from tight oil shale formations were marginal in comparison to total U.S. oil production; however, tight oil now makes up 52 percent of all U.S. oil production.

The Department of the Interior will include “all available” federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico that have not already been leased out for offshore oil drilling. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Monday 73 million acres off the coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida would be offered at a lease sale in August as part of the Interior Department’s five-year leasing plan. “Opening more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling is a pillar of President Trump’s plan to make the United States energy independent,” Zinke said in a statement. Interior finalized its current five-year offshore...

Data from the last seismic survey done in the ANWR in the early 1980s suggest the region potentially contains some ten billion barrels of recoverable oil, says Houseknecht—enough to meet U.S. demand for about a year and a half. But the uncertainty is large. In 2002, estimates of the recoverable oil in the vast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), to the west of Prudhoe Bay, were also more than ten billion barrels. That estimate fell by 90 percent in 2010 after exploratory wells found mostly gas. What Obama's Drilling Bans Mean for Alaska and the Arctic

If the GOP-controlled Legislature goes along with Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf's renewed call for a severance tax, it would be a surefire way to debilitate Pennsylvania's shale-gas industry. Always a bad idea, a severance tax is an even worse idea this time around — because 2016 saw the industry “shed a third of its jobs” and gas prices are still rebounding “from record lows,” according to the Commonwealth Foundation. The state's own Independent Fiscal Office estimates that Pennsylvania's existing impact fee is the equivalent of a 6.9-percent severance tax — higher than severance taxes in Louisiana, Wyoming and West Virginia.

resident Obama apparently wants his legacy to be one of energy starvation for the United States and dependence on foreign energy from friendly places like Saudi Arabia and Iran. His ban on offshore drilling in federally owned waters off our Atlantic and Arctic coasts makes no sense, either environmentally or economically. As the Washington Times notes, Obama thinks he can get away with it: Vowing that his successor won’t be able to reverse his actions, President Obama on Tuesday used executive authority to permanently ban new offshore drilling in federally owned waters off the Atlantic coast and in the Arctic...