Executives from some of America's largest oil companies agreed to testify before a congressional committee—hours after a different slate of oil executives refused to appear before a separate committee.
On Tuesday, the House Natural Resources Committee announced that the chief executives of EOG Resources, Devon Energy, and Occidental Petroleum declined to participate in a hearing next week that would have focused on the industry's stockpile of approved but unused drilling permits on public lands. The three companies combined hold more than 2,800 of those approved permits.
Hours after Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva blasted the CEOs for refusing to appear before Congress, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that a subpanel would hear from Devon, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and Pioneer Natural Resources executives at a different hearing next week. That hearing, scheduled for April 6, is titled “Gouged at the Gas Station: Big Oil and America’s Pain at the Pump.”
The hearing comes on the heels of a new report by Oil Change International that found American oil and gas companies are on track to reap windfall profits of between $37 billion and $126 billion in 2022 alone due to high oil prices as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
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