OIl and Gas

Competing Narratives About Oil and Gas Production and the Role of Federal Lands: II. The WaPo “Truth” Story and the Role of Big Investors

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You can see the federal oil and gas production for 2014 for your state by going to this ballotpedia site.https://ballotpedia.org/Oil_and_natural_gas_extraction_on_federal_land

Last time we talked about how much oil and gas is produced on federal lands and waters, and how much demand there is domestically. So now let’s dig further into available information.

It seems like only one of these things can be true: (1)  Whatever percentage of federal production is a small part of US demand so it can’t have that much of an effect on climate, especially since in the real world, we import to make up the difference (substitution).(T)

This is against what the Sierra Club and others have been saying…

(2) Fossil fuel production on federal lands is destroying the planet. If we follow this, this statement must be (F). Well, many in Political World engage in hype, but I think we want to peer through the hype curtains to see the truth or truths, insofar as we can.

If it is a small proportion, and doesn’t have impact on supply or prices, then inquiring minds might wonder “why was/is there such a grandiose campaign about this?”  Including all the D candidates for Prez weighing in? These facts have been known for a long time. Both the proportion of production, the economic contributions, and US demand.  Of all the possible climate targets, why was this one selected and what was their reasoning? It could be that it was aligned with the idea of “protecting” federal lands, which would leave the proponents in an awkward spot with regard to wind turbines, solar arrays and mining for erstwhile green materials. Or it was a convenient nexus because federal land policy is necessarily federalized-if you get it nationally you don’t have to deal with it state by state.

Economics (a science) tells us that if you reduce supply without reducing demand,  prices increase. And we know that that  would have an unequal impact on poorer folks who must drive to work.  And rural poor folks can’t simply be exhorted to take the bus..because there are none.   And it’s not a great thing for many folks not poor, coming into the mid-term. So that’s why the Admin is trying to hook up with the Saudis, Iran and Venezuela.

But there have been some news articles that look into this question more deeply. Again, let’s think about this in the context of private vs. federal, oil vs. gas, and onshore vs. offshore subcategories. Sometimes it’s hard to tell in news stories which of these they are talking about in which paragraph. So I’m hoping together we can parse some of this out, even if we have to go into areas that are way beyond our usual habitat (e.g. behavior of investors).

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post wrote an article titled Seeking the Truth which is worth a read. Sadly I think it’s behind a paywall, which more biased, inflammatory,and some untrue articles are not.

I did question one thing he said..

“The reverse can also be true. The Trump’s administration’s opposite “green light” approach — few regulations and no restraints — led some oil drillers to invest in unprofitable wells.”

Perhaps it’s just the WaPo pro forma swipe at the Trump Admin, but “no restraints” seems a little over the top if you’re talking about federal lands. And if you’re talking about private, states regulate them.  And it seems to me, at least in Colorado, that Trump had little or an actual negative influence on state policies (whatever he was for, they were strongly against. Here’s another statement.

In 2021, the United States slipped to third place in oil production, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. That’s mainly because large shale companies committed to Wall Street that they would continue to limit production and return more cash to shareholders — “an effort to win back investors who fled the industry after years of poor returns,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Scott Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, told investors in February: “$100 oil, $150 oil, we’re not going to change our growth rate.”

U.S. oil producers boosted output by more than 50 percent between 2016 and 2020, so it’s certainly possible for the United States to once again become the world’s biggest oil producer. But investors are demanding that companies do not overspend on new investments this time around.

So.. we know that the Biden Admin and its favored interest groups have been against oil and gas production. They seek to reduce it via shutting it down on federal lands (if legal) and increasing regulation. Not that those regulatory ideas are necessarily bad, but they are certainly sending a less than positive message to the industry and investors. Which of us would invest in an industry that seems on the cusp of the Admin and its allies dreaming up new tactics to shut it down? But what I didn’t see in the WaPo article was the role of “institutional investors”, including those divesting from fossil fuels

For example, Tisha Schuller talks about BlackRock in a series of her posts:

Climate-aligned strategy. The opening sentence on climate risk in BlackRock’s proxy voting guidance: “BlackRock believes that climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” Therefore, BlackRock specifies that its portfolio companies should:
Articulate how their business models align with “a scenario in which global warming is limited to well below 2°C, moving towards global net zero emissions by 2050.”
Disclose business plans that articulate how they will deliver long-term financial performance through the global net-zero transition.
Demonstrate that these plans are resilient under likely decarbonization scenarios and the global aspiration of limiting warming to 1.5C.
Establish (in a continuation of previous guidance) short-, medium-, and long-term science-based targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions.

So in effect, it could be that in the efforts to “do the right thing” climate wise, investors may be doing “the wrong thing” for citizens of say, the US. And it probably isn’t too great a leap to think that less-well off people don’t have much of a voice in these decisions. So perhaps the monied set policy indirectly.

In case you’re wondering “who the heck is BlackRock?” here’s an article.. which notes that they are an increasingly influential player in Washington DC. Apparently they are the world’s largest asset manager.

So.. some have portrayed industry’s unwillingness to invest in capacity as greed.. but as we often say re:forest issues.. “it’s more complicated than that.”

Competing Narratives About Oil and Gas Production and the Role of Federal Lands: I. What Do the Data Tell Us?

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If you’ve been following the coverage of energy needs and why gas prices are high, as the war in the Ukraine has caused concerns about disruptions to energy in Europe, the U.S. and other places, it seems like both the coastal media, ENGO’s and oil and gas producers are, naturally, telling different stories.  Can we parse these out and see some of what the facts tell us,  and what the federal lands have to do with it?  I’m hoping that people more knowledgeable than I on these topics can contribute.  Fortunately both the BLM and EIA have easily accessible data, so we should be able to draw our own conclusions. I’d also like to go back to an old post featuring Michael Webber, a mechanical engineering professor:

Take climate change: When scientists and environmental activists take stock of the mess we are in, the oil and gas sector is a handy villain. For people tapping into their instinct for retribution, the petroleum industry ought to be punished for the damage it has caused and cut out from any opportunity to participate in the upcoming transition to a clean energy economy.

Later in the article, he says:

But blaming the industry leaves out our own culpability for our consumptive, impactful lifestyles. Oil consumption is as much about demand as supply.

I received an email from the Sierra Club “URGENT: Fossil fuel leasing on public lands is destroying the planet.”  So let’s look at their claim from the demand side.

The WaPo has an article from March 8 describing where countries can go to replace oil  from Russia. It’s got some interested charts. According to them,

This is a daunting task, especially since global demand for oil is expected to climb 3.2 million barrels a day in 2022 to a total of 100.6 million a day, according to the International Energy Agency’s most recent monthly report.

I think these discussions are confusing, for one reason, because people don’t necessarily separate oil from natural gas when people talk about “fossil fuels.”  And the second thing is that production, workforce, investments, facilities and so on (plus markets) are extremely complicated.  It’s dubious as to whether most of the people talking about stopping fossil fuels understand the mechanics of all that.  So there is a gap between the talkers and writers, on the one hand, and the doers, on the other hand.

So if we’re to examine the Sierra Club’s claim, first we would look at how much oil and natural gas is actually produced on federal lands?

Here’s what BLM says:

For fiscal year (FY) 2018, sales of oil, gas, and natural gas liquids produced from the Federal and Tribal mineral estate accounted for approximately 8 percent of all oil, 9 percent of all natural gas, and 6 percent of all natural gas liquids produced in the United States.

Another problem with our understanding, besides the oil/natural gas difference, is the onshore versus offshore difference. Clearly they are different in both environmental impacts, and affected and concerned states. And people who round up the numbers don’t use the same years. But we can still see a general outline of the picture.

Conveniently, our friends at the Congressional Research Service published a study in 2018 with a handy table.

Now, I’m definitely not an expert on this, but it’s interesting to me how little the onshore produced compared to private and offshore federal. It’s 5% of domestic oil production. Using the same numbers, for 2017, I came up with 10% for onshore natural gas. (Total of domestic production for all federal was 13% for gas).

But what did the US consume in oil and natural gas? According to the EIA,

In 2021, the United States consumed an average of about 19.78 million barrels of petroleum per day, or a total of about 7.22 billion barrels of petroleum.

and

The United States used about 30.5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas in 2020, the equivalent of about 31.5 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) and 34% of U.S. total energy consumption.

I’d have to say that I can’t agree with the Sierra Club that federal land fossil fuel extraction is “destroying the planet.” It seems like a relatively small piece of the national (no to speak of the planetary) puzzle.  It’s also helping out poorer states with bids and royalties, which seems like social justice.

You can check out revenues to states and counties, as well as Native Americans, on this handy DOI website.

I’d like to give a big shoutout to BLM, the Natural Resources Revenue Data folks, and EIA for making my work on this topic relatively easy.

And circling back to the WaPo article, an Admin that favors equity and social justice, it seems logical to me, would prefer production and the associated benefits to accrue to say, Louisiana, rather than to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Venezuela.

Career Feds Gone Wild: BLM and APD Approvals?

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From the Farmington Daily Times- part of a good article outlining the approval process

As I predicted, when Republicans are in power, things some ENGO’s (or perhaps PENGOs, for Partisanly inclined ENGOs) don’t like are blamed on evil Republicans.  And folks are very concerned about impacts to career feds, the innocuous victims of bad political appointees. But when D’s are in power, the identical activities can be blamed on the career feds. These two concepts seem to conflict a bit, but perhaps I’m the only person who notices?  An interesting example is this piece by Jonathan Thompson who runs the “Land Desk”- lots of interesting and valuable articles there, but perhaps not this one.

Stepping back, we at TSW investigated on our own the reason for increased approved APD’s during the Biden Admin (held up by some as “Biden isn’t doing enough.”)

Rebecca Watson had some ideas in this comment here , and here’s what a BLM person from State X told me: “there was a big surge in State X and I think there were a variety of reasons for that including the election results, companies getting pre-positioned for any resultant post pandemic oil price increase and finally, companies catching up on activities that have a big field work component that were impacted by folks minimizing group interactions, working from home, etc..”

What I find interesting about stories I’ve read that mention this is that the increase is used as a talking point to make the case “not doing enough” (a political push toward COP26) and the other side of the story is not being told. So much of what I read is not “news” in the traditional sense of 1) telling what’s happening and 2) trying to understand why (note, this article is not news, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is and should be held to those standards).

And even while leasing was paused, the BLM continued to hand out drilling permits at a feverish pace. Since Biden’s inauguration, the agency has issued the following tally of approvals:

  • California: 56 (all by the Bakersfield Field Office)
  • Alaska: 6
  • Colorado: 15 (Royal Gorge, Tres Rios, and White River Field Offices)
  • New Mexico: 1,372 (1,275 in the Carlsbad Field Office, or Permian Basin; 94 in the Farmington Field Office, or San Juan Basin)
  • Utah: 183 (170 in Vernal Field Office with the rest in Moab and Price)
  • Wyoming: 693 (376 in Buffalo Field Office; 198 in Casper Field Office; 74 in the Pinedale Field Office)

That’s a lot of drilling permits, making Trump’s energy dominance look a little flaccid, at best. I had a conversation with a colleague about this phenomenon recently. He argued that the BLM had no choice but to issue the permits, since the oil and gas companies were vested with private property rights when they acquired the leases. Both industry and field office managers make the same argument, parroting the ideology of the Wise Use movement of the 1990s, but it’s mostly bogus. Grazing leases and oil and gas leases are on public land, and they do not confer private property rights to anyone. If that was the case, then why bother with the permitting process? Why not just offer the drilling permits with the lease?

At the same time, it’s not Biden himself, or even Haaland, who is handing out the drilling permits. It’s the field office managers, who tend to operate how they choose, regardless of who’s in the Oval Office.

(My bold) Mr.Thompson thinks the validity of lease sales is “bogus” but having sat through innumerable meetings with Interior Solicitors and USDA OGC on exactly this issue, enthusiatically trying to get the USG out of leases on the Thompson Divide, I’d say.. not. I don’t know if Mr. Thompson believes this about BLM managers, or whether this is another polemical throw-away line.

Why Pick Federal Lands as (the) Climate Target? Examining Potential Environmental Justice Impacts

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In this March 25, 2014 photo, workers keep an eye on well heads during a hydraulic fracturing operation at an Encana Corp. oil well, near Mead, Colo. This is not federal land. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

There are many ways to decrease our country’s carbon footprint.  But for some reason, it seems like federal lands oil and gas leasing has become a symbolic, if not very useful, preferred intervention of some groups (some charitable foundations).  In a recent op-ed in the Denver Post,  Jennifer Rokala of the Center for Western Priorities wrote:

President Biden’s infrastructure plan is a bold vision to move America to a clean energy future–but vision is meaningless without action.

Next month, the president will head to a global climate summit, urging world leaders to cut carbon emissions, while he simultaneously expands oil and gas drilling at home and does nothing to fix a broken leasing system. When the president encourages Congress and the world to act, he has an obligation to lead by example.

Now, as we’ve discussed previously, it seems eminently reasonable to me for the Admin to be leery of being in contempt of court with regard to the leasing process. Is it actually true to say “Biden has expanded oil and gas drilling at home?”.. or is the Admin just following rules, plans, etc. currently in place.. that legally they would need to follow specific procedures to change? So to whom is this particular climate intervention such a big issue? Easiest to get maximum climate benefits (don’t think so)? Some kind of low-hanging political fruit? Least impact to poor communities? And while we think mostly of onshore, not to forget offshore federal is also part of the deal. Some federal oil producing states (Mississippi, Louisiana, as well as onshore New Mexico) are among the poorest US states.

At the same time, this interesting article from another Jennifer, Hernandez of the Breakthrough Institute, touches on impacts of such policies on energy workers who happen to be people of color.

But unaffordable utility bills are only half the story. California climate policies also require the elimination of hundreds of thousands of conventional energy jobs, and will adversely affect millions of other jobs in energy-dependent and related industries. These sectors provide stable, higher-paying employment for less educated residents, the majority of whom are workers of color and recent immigrants. In 2019, 29 percent of all new immigrants had not graduated from high school.[42]A further 20 percent finished high school but did not attend college. As better-paying blue collar work has evaporated, most have ended up in the state’s lowest-paying jobs — that massive cohort of nearly 40 percent of Californians who cannot afford to pay routine monthly expenses.

An analysis of 2017 data by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) found that “across all levels of education, earnings are higher in oil and gas industries compared to the all industry average.”[43]The energy sector provides over 152,100 direct and 213,860 indirect and induced jobs in California that pay higher wages and benefits for individuals with lower levels of education. This workforce is ethnically and racially diverse, and about 63 percent of all employees have less than a bachelor’s degree.

LAEDC also showed that another 3.9 million California jobs (16.5 percent of total state employment) rely on purchases from or use products sold by state energy producers, including chemical, machinery, and metal products manufacturing, wholesale trade, utilities, and transportation, as well as professional, scientific, and technical services.[44]Most of these sectors also provide higher-paying jobs for workers of color, often in more affordable areas of the state. These jobs are also at risk from the forced elimination of the in-state energy sector.

California climate advocates have utterly failed to provide a convincing explanation for how workers of color employed in existing energy and energy-dependent sectors will support their families once these industries are gone. Many, like the fantastically wealthy, famously haughty John Kerry, now the nation’s “climate envoy,” airily suggest that green employment will replace job losses in the fossil fuel sector. Even the staunchly progressive Washington Post conceded that this was unlikely, noting that rapid growth in the wind and solar industries over the next decade could plausibly replace at most 20 percent of the workforce of the coal industry alone.[45]

Trade unions and their Democratic political allies aren’t buying what California’s climate cognoscenti are selling either. “Career opportunities for renewables are nowhere near what they are in gas and oil, and domestic energy workers highly value the safety, reliable duration and compensation of oil and gas construction jobs,” North America’s Building Trades Unions said in July 2020 after conducting two studies of the industry.[46]“We can hate on oil, but the truth is our refinery jobs are really good middle class jobs,” echoed California state senator and labor leader Lorena Gonzalez. “Jobs can’t be an afterthought to any climate change legislation. We must have specific plans that accompany industry changes.”[47]

There are no such plans. California’s oil consumption continues, slowing only with the pandemic, while progressive climate elites see no irony in forcing California’s minority communities out of jobs while importing more oil from Saudi Arabia and other countries not known for adherence to progressive labor, gender, environmental, or civil rights values.

I also ran across this article on “Civil rights readers oppose swift move off natural gas”

Hernandez also has some other interesting thoughts on housing and transportation, which are related to other TSW topics of interest. I’ll take that up in another post.

Biden Administration Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Moratorium/Delay/Analysis/Appeal: E&E News

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If you haven’t been following the Biden Administration federal lands oil and gas leasing situation, there was a promised oil and gas review due in “early summer”  that hasn’t come out yet.  Meanwhile a federal judge told the Administration that legally couldn’t hold up leasing indefinitely.  Today there was a balanced and comprehensive story in E&E News that covers it. Best of all, there’s no paywall.

The Interior Department raised anxieties on all sides last night when it announced plans to resume oil and gas leasing on public lands while it appeals a court ruling that banned the Biden administration’s earlier leasing moratorium.

But Biden officials offered few details on where, or when, new leasing might occur — typically muted messaging for the administration on the fraught battle over the future of the federal oil program. That reticence has left lingering questions from oil allies, conservation groups and politicians interested in Biden’s management of the country’s stores of crude oil and natural gas.

The White House froze new oil and gas lease sales shortly after President Biden took office. That order was part of a larger plan to do a comprehensive review of the federal oil program in light of its contribution to climate change, potentially raising royalty rates to offset climate costs.

Biden officials promised an interim report on that review by early summer but failed to follow through. The delay has stoked further tension with Republican lawmakers opposed to the leasing freeze.

Interior’s announcement that it plans to fight the judge’s ban on the moratorium irked the Congressional Western Caucus, whose members accused Biden of “failing the nation” for the leasing freeze after recently asking OPEC to increase oil production to depress gasoline prices.

I do think the Congressional Western Caucus raises an interesting point. So far there have been two national “no”s to oil and gas, Keystone Pipeline, that impacted Canada (an ally), and oil and gas leasing on federal lands. And there have been two international “yeses”; the Nordstream 2 Pipeline from Russia to Germany and to OPEC to increase production. It seems like the Keystone and federal land ban were mostly symbolic in comparison, and response to pressure to do so from some ENGO’s. The environmental upside of higher gas prices is that they would decrease demand, but the social justice downside is that people with less money would suffer.

Governor Newsome made this statement last year:

“As it relates to managing decline, we’ve got to address the issue of demand. California since 1985, has declined its (oil) production by 60 percent, but only seen a modest decrease in demand, 4.4 percent,” Newsom said. “And that means were making up for a lack of domestic production from Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, and Colombia, and that’s hardly an environmental solution when you look globally.”

And yet in April decided to phase out oil and gas extraction in California “as part of nation-leading effort to achieve carbon neutrality.” All very puzzling. Anyway, back to federal leasing. Also puzzling to me was this response:

For many environmentalists, Interior’s announcement that it would continue leasing represented a capitulation on the one firm action Biden had taken to curb federal drilling.

“With the climate crisis smacking us in the face at every turn, it’s hard to imagine a worse idea than resuming oil and gas drilling on federal lands,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, in a statement last night.

But the Biden Administration is under a court order to.. follow the law. I’m sure there are very smart lawyers advising appointees about exactly how far they can go (or how long they can wait) before being in contempt. And the Administration appealed the decision. So not sure exactly what Weissman expects them to do.

A spokesperson for Interior declined to provide a time frame for new lease sales.

Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, said the agency seems to be saying that it will lean on its discretionary authority under federal law around leasing decisions to address these issues before leasing resumes.

“Leasing will only happen once Interior chooses to exercise its discretion to lease and accounts for the myriad shortcomings of the onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing programs,” he said in an email.

That stance promises to rile the opposition, which has been steadfast in insisting that the White House must lease under federal law, as well as under the judicial mandate to lift the moratorium.

“The Interior statement was revealing,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, the first group to sue over the Biden leasing moratorium in January. “Apparently, Interior leadership thinks they are above the law.”

Among the things I don’t understand is why it is taking so long to come up with the “early summer” report..the Biden Admin has many smart, knowledgeable, and experienced people who have been thinking about this for years. They can call on anyone in the country. They have all the lawyers you could want to check on the legality. As Secretary Haaland said in May, “Everyone’s been working really hard on it. We expect to have it released in early summer.”

They don’t have to do an EIS or get public comment. So what’s holding it up?

And Mark Squllace’s take:

Mark Squillace, a natural resource law expert at the University of Colorado Law School, said the administration is going to increase royalty rates and fees, alongside other drilling restrictions. That will increase revenues in the near term while depressing some public oil development in the long term.

But the administration has bigger fish to fry when it comes to climate action, he said, noting that the industry is overwhelmingly located on private land and there isn’t much to be done about the large amounts of public land held by industry already.

“I don’t think that oil and gas development on public lands will be the sword that the administration is prepared to die on,” he said.

But back to the domestic oil and gas workers.  The fine folks of OPEC countries (of questionable human rights, and environmental regulations) are preferable to our own workers and regulations for producing the oil and gas products we use everyday? Not a socially just, nor environmentally beneficial, solution.

Interior Oil and Gas Leasing Public Forum: Highlights and Reflections

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Slide from presentation on BLM leasing
This webinar is worth a watch for anyone interested in the topic. Here’s the agenda. Folks at Interior couched this as being presentations by “experts”; I would call them interests, myself. The recording is available here.

* Excellent explanation of the BLM leasing process by Nada Culver. Culver, according to this E&E news story, may also be up for the permanent BLM Director post (Senate-confirmed). Culver is an environmental attorney, formerly working for National Audubon.

* We heard from Indigenous interests first. Sharp (National Congress of American Indians) and Borromeo (Alaska Federation of Natives) both focused on the importance of all forms of energy production to their communities, region and the country. As Borromeo said (not an absolutely exact quote) “we don’t inhabit an either/or space about energy production and refuse to be caught between industry and environmental groups.” Sharp is at 49:31 and Borromeo is around 1 hour. Both Sharp and Borromeo represented Native organizations. According to their websites:

As a member-based representative Congress, NCAI is governed by voting members who determine NCAI’s consensus positions expressed in resolutions, which are developed in committees and sub-committees and then voted on at national conventions. NCAI members also elect the organization’s Executive Committee – the NCAI President, 1st Vice President, Recording Secretary, and Treasurer. These are elected by the entire membership.

The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) is the largest statewide Native organization in Alaska. Its membership includes 168 federally recognized tribes, 166 village corporations, 8 regional corporations, and 12 regional nonprofit and tribal consortiums that contract and compact to run federal and state programs. AFN is governed by a 38-member board, which is elected by its membership at the annual convention held each October.

One speaker (Mario Atencio) on the panel represented a Dine’ environmental group (Dine’ CARE). The website’s tagline is “Citizens against ruining our environment.”

*The discussion of offshore leasing. I thought Frank Macchiarola of API did a great job of explaining the pros of offshore. He naturally mentioned that receipts are used to fund popular programs such as LWCF. Dr. David Yoskowitz, of Corpus Christi, talked about the success of a broad-based coalition the “Gulf of Mexico Alliance”.. it would be interesting to learn more about their collaboration.

* 2/3 of the Indigenous presentations, and the two labor presentation were very similar in concern for working people in the US. As long as we’re using it here, why not produce it here? All acknowledged we need to transition to new energy sources, but were wary of dumping existing jobs for those which only exist in the talking points of political folk.

If you only have a small amount of time (each presentation is five minutes), I’d listen to the Indigenous and the Labor presentations, because those voices are less heard in many news stories.

* There was a panel of “equity experts” – three folks from NGO’s concerned about equity, the Hispanic Access Foundation, NAACP Climate Justice Program and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. These NGO’s are interesting because they spoke as if they were representing the interests of ethnic/racial groups, without having a mechanism for representation.
For example, the Hispanic Access Foundation’s conservation program says

Hispanic Access Foundation’s conservation program seeks to elevate diverse Latino voices and leaders to support Latino communities to advocate for the environmental issues that directly affect their daily lives.

It’s interesting that the Hispanic Access Foundation has been funded by the Hewlett Foundation. I wasn’t surprised as the speaker made some claims about how Hispanics feel about issues based on the Colorado College poll, also funded by Hewlett as part of a larger initiative. More on this aspect in a later post. What I’d like to draw attention to here is the question of equity.. is it something to be judged based on how members of disadvantaged groups feel? How do you find that out? Do you need to be an “equity expert” to weigh in and how do those experts arrive at their conclusions? How does diversity and inclusion in the oil and gas industry fit into equity.. or does it? Where is the overlap between social justice and environmental justice or do we need separate social and environmental equity panels?

For example, we can look at figures like these (note, the Permian is not on federal land).

In 2019, Permian companies employed more than 12,560 women and 48 percent of all oil and gas jobs were held by Hispanic or Latino workers, according to the report.

and wonder, would their views more allied with the Hispanic Access Foundation, or the views of the union reps?

Speaking of the union reps, in the Q&A one of them said that the wind industry paid about half (less than a living wage) of what the oil and gas industry pays, and suggested that any wind turbines on federal land be required to pay better. I didn’t catch all of it, but I had never heard that before.

Bottom line for this public forum- if you’re for Indigenous and unions (as the Biden Admin is), you have plenty of political cover to stand up to folks like NRDC (whose rep gave what sounded like a political speech, not really what I heard the Interior folks ask for). Check out some of the presentations (they are each five minutes, so are mostly very focused) and let us know what you think.

Interior Department Public Forum on Federal Oil and Gas Forum Zoom March 25, 2021

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Here’s the link.

Interior Department Announces Details for Public Forum on Federal Oil and Gas Program

Date: Thursday, March 18, 2021
Contact: [email protected]

WASHINGTON – The Interior Department today released additional information about the upcoming virtual forum regarding the federal oil and gas program, including the public’s viewing options and ability to submit written input to inform Interior’s review.

The public forum is part of Interior’s comprehensive review of the federal oil and gas program as called for in Executive Order 14008 and will feature several panels to highlight perspectives from invited participants including industry representatives, labor and environmental justice organizations, natural resource advocates, Indigenous organizations, and other experts.    

DATE: Thursday, March 25, 2021

TIME: 1:00 pm – 4:30 pm ET

REGISTRATION: The forum will take place via Zoom Webinar. Anyone interested in viewing the forum may register via Zoom. A livestream of the event will also be available at doi.gov/events. The forum will be recorded and have live captions.

The information gathered at the forum will help inform an interim report from the Department that will be completed in early summer. The report will include initial findings on the state of the federal conventional energy programs, as well as outline next steps and recommendations for the Department and Congress to improve stewardship of public lands and waters, create jobs, and build a just and equitable energy future.

Members of the public can submit additional information through April 15 to inform Interior’s interim report at [email protected].

Seeing Through the POG: Federal Oil and Gas Leasing and the BLM Move

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One of the things I like about Democratic administrations is that we can talk about issues without what I call a cloud of POG, or Partisan Outrage Generation. It’s hard to see through it when it is so prevalent. So I’m going to pick two issues that have aroused a great deal of concern and see what they look like without POG. Unfortunately, many media outlets and sources of journalism funding actually promote POG, so it takes some careful looking for articles to get past it.

1. Oil and gas leasing on federal lands. The WaPo had this story from November 19.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), a Biden ally, has said she would ask for an exemption from any leasing ban. Three New Mexico Democrats — Rep. Deb Haaland and Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich — are all in the running to be Biden’s interior secretary, and they have differing views on whether to prohibit new drilling on public lands and waters.

Both Udall and Heinrich have expressed reservations about a total ban. In a recent interview, Udall called for setting a goal of “carbon-neutral” public lands, where the emissions from fossil fuel extraction could be offset by reforestation and other activities that remove carbon from the atmosphere. “That’s where we should be headed,” he said.

 

I like Udall’s idea with one addition. For those of you with a historic bent it’s a bit like the National Grasslands becoming an experiment station for the best practices following the Dust Bowl. It could be an opportunity to produce fossil fuels in as environmentally sensitive a way as possible- an experimental ground for innovation. We’re going to use the stuff anyway (and perhaps help other countries convert from coal to natural gas?), so we might as well be an example as to how to do it. I’m imagining a multi-university consortium with industry to develop and test best practices. Now Udall’s bonafides are a 98% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, so I don’t think you can attack him for being in the pocket of corporate polluters and all that familiar anti-R rhetoric.

2. Moving Some BLM Folks to Grand Junction.

This has been a target of the usual suspects; Center for Western Priorities, Grijalva, et al. Colorado Politics had this interesting POG-free article.

GRAND JUNCTION — Colorado U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper says he is urging President Joe Biden’s Interior secretary nominee to keep the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management in the Western Slope city of Grand Junction.

Hickenlooper met Tuesday with Deb Haaland, a Democratic U.S. representative from New Mexico, and invited her to western Colorado to “hear from the community firsthand” about why the public lands agency headquarters should stay, his office said in a statement.

The Democratic senator said that “I made the case that, done correctly, we can better protect and manage our public lands by having a BLM headquarters out west. I look forward to working with her when she’s confirmed as Interior Secretary to make this a reality.”

Hickenlooper sits on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which will hold a hearing on Haaland’s nomination in the coming weeks.

The meeting came a day after Hickenlooper, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert and Gov. Jared Polis met remotely with local officials to discuss a lobbying effort aimed at Haaland.

Biden’s oil plan: The good, the bad and the illegal: E&E News Story

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The State gets 48% of bonus bids which would stop with no new leasing. Of course bids would be lower anyway, as other payments due to market conditions.

Here’s a shout-out to Heather Richards of E&E News for diving into this with this story. This is extremely complicated stuff so if anyone can help clarify, please do so!

1. No fracking? No oil and gas drilling at all? No new leases? No new permits? If you’re confused..

The campaign’s proposal includes a first-day promise to ban new permitting, which approves specific drilling plans, and bar new leasing, which gives prospectors a 10-year property right to develop federal minerals.

The president-elect’s platform has also pledged an end to hydraulic fracturing on public lands, a contentious development technique that is ubiquitous in the U.S. oil patch and has long stoked criticism from environmentalists.

But if you ban new O&G permits and leases, then isn’t fracking a subset of what you have already ended by not allowing new O&G permits and leases? It’s almost as if people use fracking interchangeably with O&G sometimes, but not other times.

2. End to leasing.. “just say no,” plus four years of intensive plan and EIS production?

An end to leasing is widely viewed as the most feasible part of the Biden oil and gas proposals, according to experts.

“The leasing part is very doable. The permitting part is a lot harder,” said Kevin Book managing director at ClearView Energy Partners LLC.

A lease is a property right to develop federal minerals. And there are several ways that the administration can simply stop selling these leases temporarily, as the Obama administration did with coal in 2016 when it overtook a review of the federal coal program, Book said.

The Biden administration could make more long-term gains by penning regulations and management plans that make less land and water available for leasing in the future, he said.

Over time, a leasing ban strategy could take a bite out of federal oil and gas production with long-term implications that could outlast a four- or eight-year presidential tenure, according to Book.

The analyst firm Wood Mackenzie said in a brief Saturday that an end to leasing on federal land would be “minimal” in the near term. With offshore, the ban would play out gradually. By 2035, production would be roughly 30% less than if leasing had continued, the firm estimated.

I wonder about the “minimal” could be minimal changes in production/CO2, but not so much minimal in terms of payments to states from bonus bids. And of course if COVID/low prices have major effects bids would go down unpredictably anyway.

3. End to permitting.. more difficult, and less legal

A permitting ban, which Biden has targeted as a day one priority when he enters the White House, represents a trickier attempt to reduce oil and gas activity, Book said.

Once a company that holds a lease wants to take action to develop those minerals, it files an application for permit to drill with the Bureau of Land Management, for onshore wells, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, for offshore.

If permitting is blocked, a company could argue the federal government is violating its legal right to develop, said Watson, the former Interior assistant secretary.

“I would question legally if that would be so easy to do,” Watson said. “What would be the grounds for that and then what would be the action?”

4. D Governor Asks for Waiver From Fracking Ban

In another E&E news story, Heather Richard talks about some implications of a ban for a largely Democratic relatively low-income state, New Mexico, and the request of the Governor (talked about as a potential new Cabinet member) for a waiver.

A painful fracking ban?
It was not a huge surprise when New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who signed the 2019 Energy Transition Act committing New Mexico to hit 100% renewable energy by 2045, said she’d ask for a fracking-ban waiver, if a president were to institute one.

I can’t help but point out that former candidate and current Senator Sanders introduced a bill to ban fracking. His home state still uses oil and natural gas. Vermont, according to EIA:

“Nearly 3 out of 5 Vermont households heat their homes with petroleum, 1 out of 5 use natural gas, and almost 1 out of 6 burn wood for heat. More than one-third of Vermont schoolchildren attend facilities heated by wood products.”

Perhaps New Mexico legislators should introduce a bill to reduce carbon emissions and local environmental pollution by banning dairy cattle across the United States?
I think part of a unifying kind of policy is making sure that climate interventions are developed jointly with communities, States and Tribes, and that benefits and costs are spread fairly across the country, and across races, classes and cultures, as justice might require. That’s certainly easier to write in a position statement than to do.

Assuming the Best About Federal Employees and Their Challenges: Why Not?

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When I was a post-doc at North Carolina State University I worked for a Pioneering Research Scientist (the top level of scientists in the Forest Service), Dr. Gene Namkoong. He used to say something I can’t remember exactly, but it was something like “when the Forest Service does something bad, don’t assume malevolence or bad faith when they could have simply been disorganized, made a mistake, or so on.” I can’t remember his exact words, but it gave me the impression of good people bumbling along in a complicated system. Gene died a few years ago, or I would ask him.

Assuming the best about people (I suppose it could be argued that the FS is an institution and not people, but does that matter in this context?) is a long held spiritual value, at least in some traditions.  Another value is humility. Still another value is being “impeccable with your word” as in the Four Agreements. Political races, in fact, partisan politics itself, encourage the opposite.  Thankfully we are out of this for now, and President-elect Biden has spoken a great deal about unity- specifically, that people who think and vote differently are not our enemies.  Hopefully The Smokey Wire’s work, seeing through the recurrent partisan spin, hearing the voices of people who think differently, and trying our best to understand each other, will help with the new administration’s efforts.

Remember when the 60-day royalty rate reduction for oil and gas folks was being covered?  That was the end of the story for many.  In Colorado, though, we do have folks who investigate further, thanks to Colorado Politics and their story here.

There was a GAO review of the process.
When developing its temporary royalty relief policy, BLM did not follow guidance for developing new policy contained in its directives manual, including considering a policy’s savings and costs. BLM’s directives manual provides guidance for developing policies that are short-term in nature and are meant to be provided to BLM employees quickly. Among other things, the directives manual says BLM should consider the effects of any temporary policy, including budget impact, costs, and savings, when developing temporary policies such as the temporary royalty relief policy.BLM officials told us that they did not use the directives manual to develop the agency’s temporary policy for royalty relief because of the limited time that the agency had to develop the policy during the early months of the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, BLM’s directives manual states that emergency notifications—in this case, the temporary royalty relief policy—should not be used to circumvent the BLM directives system. By evaluating its temporary royalty relief policy, including the extent to which the policy met BLM’s objectives—preventing unrecoverable loss of oil and gas resources and ensuring a fair return to the government—and the likely costs, such as forgone revenues—BLM could better inform its decisions about granting royalty relief in the future under the agency’s regulation authorizing ongoing royalty relief.
Reading the GAO report, I had a great deal of sympathy for the BLM folks faced with implementing these old and unclear regulations, and was not surprised that they were not consistent from state to state. Let’s give our agency folks a break as they deal with Covid and related crises. It’s much more difficult to do things than it is to criticize others who are doing things. Think of writing a book versus a book review. I’m not saying that agency employees are always perfect, but would it hurt to give them the benefit of the doubt?