Obama’s Petroleum-Based Lies

The United States has undergone a revolution in domestic energy since 2008, increasing oil and natural gas production to the point where it now leads the world.

But don’t thank President Obama.

“If we had to rely on the [federal] government, we would have been going backward in oil and gas production.”

“We’ve had the largest increase in oil production in history on his watch,” said Dan Kish, senior vice president of policy for the Institute for Energy Research, adding that nearly all of it has occurred on state and private land. “If we had to rely on the [federal] government, we would have been going backward in oil and gas production.”

But that does not stop Obama from taking a bow any time the subject comes up. A news release from the Department of Energy in 2012 highlighted progress toward energy independence: “America’s dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year since President Obama took office. We have cut net imports by 10 percent — a million barrels a day — in the last year alone.”

In his State of the Union address in January, Obama made a similar claim.

“And meanwhile, we’ve cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly 60 percent, and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth,” he said. “Gas under two bucks a gallon ain’t bad, either.”

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Obama’s energy policies are likely to come under renewed scrutiny this week when presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump addresses an energy conference in North Dakota, one of the states that has enjoyed an energy boom — no thanks to the federal government. Critics of the president’s policies argue that the administration has done everything in its power to slow and discourage energy production.

[lz_table title=”U.S. Crude Oil Production (millions of barrels per day)” source=”Congressional Research Service”]Fiscal year,Non-federal,Federal
2008,3.492,1.545
2009,3.870,1.773
2010,3.461,1.980
2011,3.777,1.774
2012,4.578,1.646
2013,5.571,1.678
2014,6.584,1.778
2015,7.437,1.978
[/lz_table]

Nicolas Loris, an economist who studies energy for The Heritage Foundation, said oil and natural gas production has increased because of a combination of improved technology, private sector risk-taking, and pro-energy states.

“A lot of it’s been in spite of [federal] government policy,” he said. “Where we’ve seen most of the growth is on state and privately held lands.”

The most recent report on the topic from the Congressional Research Service, in February, tells the tale. Since fiscal year 2008, daily crude oil production in the United States has increased 87 percent. Production on federal lands and waters, meanwhile, is up just 28 percent over the same time period. The share of crude production coming from federal lands declined from 30.7 percent in fiscal year 2008 to 21 percent in fiscal year 2015.

[lz_table title=”U.S. Natural Gas Production (billion cubic feet)” source=”Congressional Research Service”]Fiscal year,Non-federal,Federal
2008,15.473,5.521
2009,16.240,5.373
2010,16.850,5.074
2011,18.964,4.576
2012,20.944,4.246
2013,21.733,3.818
2014,23.158,3.521
2015,25.146,3.591
[/lz_table]

The trend is similar for natural gas. Overall, domestic production is up 37 percent since fiscal year 2008 but has declined by 35 percent on federal lands, according to the report. Federal lands and waters accounted for 12.5 percent of U.S. production in fiscal year 2015, down from 26 percent in fiscal year 2008.

Loris said part of the reason why oil and gas production have been going like gangbusters on non-federal property is “geologic luck.” Producers have found new reserves, and methods such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have allowed companies to recover oil and natural gas from places that was previously expensive, he said.

Those improved technologies have “fundamentally changed the game,” Loris said. In some cases, companies have returned to older wells to extract reserves that they had given up on years earlier.

But Loris said the Obama administration has done little to encourage production of fossil fuels. He noted that the administration has maintained opposition to drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, has prevented offshore drilling near the coast of Alaska, and has flip-flopped on drilling off of the Atlantic Coast. Obama previously favored energy production 50 miles off the coast, but scrubbed that proposal earlier this year in the latest five-year drilling plan.

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The Congressional Research Service report shows that onshore land leased by the federal government declined from 2.6 million acres in 2008 to 1.2 million acres in 2014. Offshore, it dropped from almost 8 million acres to 2.1 million acres during the same time period.

The report indicated that it took an average of 227 days in fiscal year 2014 to approve or reject a federal permit, down from a peak of 307 in fiscal year 2011 but far higher than the 127 days it took in fiscal year 2006. Kish, of the Institute for Energy Research, said it takes about five days in Texas to get a state permit.

“The fact that the [federal] government wasn’t involved in this was what allowed it to blossom,” he said. “States have done wonderful jobs, and they’re the ones with the most at stake.”