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While researching your question, I was reminded of some of the factors that formed my answer. The Cushing OK storage center was full, and ships were holding oil with no place to put it. So prices were falling and hitting historic lows. Elsewhere for precovid 2020 $45/barrel was reported as essential for Bakkan ND break even. This April 24, 2020 article highlights some of these points including Covid worries beginning impact with $37/barrel quoted as then current price: https://taxfoundation.org/historic-oil-price-burns-hole-in-state-budgets/

“Negative price on WTI crude oil is a historic first but has happened because the cost of extracting, delivering, and storing the oil outweighs the profit from selling it. The decline has been driven by a combination of a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia as well as a lack of demand due to the coronavirus pandemic. Globally, demand is down 30 percent. The demand is key because some oil futures contracts are settled physically, which means that the owner of any contract will receive the physical oil. This fact added urgency to the market as May contracts, which traded at a negative value, expired on April 21. May contracts have to be settled in the delivery month (May) in Cushing, Oklahoma, where contract owners must take possession of the oil. However, refinery capacity across the country is down because demand is down, which means oil is simply sitting in storage in Cushing with no capacity to book any more local storage. Further, oil wells cannot easily be stopped without damaging the well, so production continues even when there is no demand.”

While searching for the answer to your question I came across this Jan. 27, 2022 article regarding Biden and leases. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/27/oil-gas-leasing-biden-climate/

“Climate advocates said they had expected Biden officials would find a way to slow drilling, either through litigation or by reopening the environmental review process for proposed lease sales — delaying them and possibly canceling them outright.Instead, the administration approved more than 3,500 oil and gas drilling permits in its first year, nearly 900 more than the Trump administration did in its first year, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Last fall, Biden officials put 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico up for auction in the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. While it sold only a fraction of that amount — about 1.7 million acres — it netted nearly $192 million and ranked as the most profitable offshore auction since March 2019. Before those leases could take effect, a federal judge invalidated the entire sale Thursday, delivering a victory to environmentalists. Judge Rudolph Contreras, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in his opinion that the government had justified the sale using a flawed analysis, which assumed that the climate impacts would be worse if the acreage went unsold. “The Court believes that [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s] error was indeed a serious failing,” Contreras wrote.

Dan Naatz, executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said in an interview that the administration “should be credited with moving forward with the drilling permits.”