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For more than a century, the oil industry has taken advantage of a broken and rigged legal system that lets it drill on public lands at bargain rates. Now, the oil industry is sitting on a remarkable 9,173 approved, but unused, federal lands drilling permits. In total, the oil industry now holds leases to roughly 25 million acres of public lands — an area approximately the size of Kentucky. Of those 25 million acres, roughly half are sitting idle, meaning oil companies hold existing rights to develop those resources, but are choosing not to.
The oil industry is cynically using the war in Ukraine to once again drag out its favorite policy playbook — blaming the president for high gas prices and asking the Interior Department to throw open all of our public lands to oil drilling while also reducing the already-weak processes for granting permits and leases. A new dashboard from the Center for Western Priorities highlights the hypocrisy of the oil industry’s push to throw even more public lands open to drilling. The data shows that the Biden administration is not standing in the way of public lands oil production and that oil companies have more drilling permits and leases than they know what to do with. In fact, oil production on public lands is near all time highs, despite industry claims that the Biden administration has suppressed domestic production.
Over the last decade, oil companies have not only been lighting excess natural gas on fire, they’ve been lighting money on fire as well. As of the beginning of 2022, oil companies listed in the S&P Oil and Gas Exploration and Production index had amassed $167 billion in debt, down from a high of $298 billion in 2020. Now that oil prices have risen, investors are looking to see profits returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, rather than invested in more production. In short, the constraints facing oil companies right now are not the availability of public lands or drilling permits, they are access to financing and supply chain shortages — the direct result of years of bad business practices.
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The oil and gas industry is taking this moment to make the point they’re always making, and will always make, that they should have more access to more federal land to drill on whenever it becomes economically advantageous for them to do so and while paying the very minimum in royalties to the taxpayers who own those resources."
