(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Trump’s promise to ‘drill, baby, drill’ probably won’t change much [1] [] Date: 2024-08-18 by Carlos Nogueras Ramos for Texas Tribune Former President Donald Trump has vowed to “drill, baby, drill” on Day One of his next administration. He wants, as his website says, for the U.S. to be “the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!” It already is — thanks to Texas. Earlier this year, the Texas Oil & Gas Association, the state’s leading industry group, reported that Texas supplied 42% of the nation’s oil in 2023. Texas broke records last year when operators drilled nearly 2 billion barrels of oil and 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And it was a banner year for oil and gas across the U.S., which produced 12.9 million barrels of oil per day. The previous record was 12.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2019. Already, the federal Energy Information Administration is projecting companies will produce on average 13.2 million barrels per day this year and 13.7 million barrels per day in 2025. No other country comes close to producing the amount of oil the United States does. Russia, the world’s second-largest producer, estimated about 9 million barrels a day in June. This wasn’t always the case. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. trailed Saudia Arabia and Russia. The U.S. took the lead in 2018. According to industry analysts Texas is again poised to contribute billions of gallons of oil this year. And next. And the one after at. A number of factors influence how much oil and gas companies should supply at any given point to meet demand, but there is no doubt that the industry is teeming with liquid oil, the analysts say. And while Trump might be encouraging more drilling, it is the market, not the person in the Oval Office who sets production standards. However, the industry would welcome less regulation, which would be more likely in any Republican administration. The Biden administration orchestrated efforts to combat climate change, including federal rules to lessen methane emissions, blocking nearly half a million acres of federal land in Alaska from drilling, temporarily pausing exports of liquefied natural gas and listing a desert lizard as endangered to protect it from extinction — neither of which has significantly impacted production, analysts say. Still, they have been enough to sour the relationship with the oil and gas industry, which has said the policies harm production and argued it wants a seat at the policy-crafting table. In contrast, Trump has pledged to eliminate any roadblocks to drilling. Texas is drilling record amount of oil thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling Most of the state’s oil comes from the Permian Basin, a 75,000-square-mile area straddling Texas and New Mexico where the biggest names in the energy industry — including Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips — are drilling. Texas’s share of the Permian Basin is owned by the state and private property owners, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Federal restrictions on drilling would mostly affect New Mexico, where half of production occurring on its soil is federally owned. Those companies and countless others pumped more oil in 2023 than the nine top-producing states in the nation combined, data by Texas 2036 showed. Drillers extracted 2 billion barrels of oil. The other states, which include Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Oklahoma and North Dakota, pumped about 1.8 billion barrels. “The sheer magnitude of oil and gas production coming out of Texas is off the charts,” said Jeremy Mazur, a senior policy adviser with Texas 2036. There is no slowdown in sight. So far this year, the state’s oil and gas regulator approved about 4,500 new drilling permits as of August. That’s about 70 percent of the permits the Railroad Commission of Texas approved last year, which was roughly 6,400. An oil drilling rig in the Permian Basin oil field on March 13, 2022 in Midland, Texas. To drill in Texas, companies must first seek approval from the commission, which has 46 days to approve an application. There is no federal law that limits how many applications the commission may approve. Texas’s most recent oil boom has been made possible due to technological advances in fracking and horizontal drilling, not a shift in law. Mazur said that a horizontal drilling boom in 2019, in which rigs drill further in distance rather than depth, allowed operators to access more oil without needing as many wells. Those advances come at a time when energy both domestically and internationally is soaring. And the rising demand for artificial intelligence computing will only add to it. “There's a whole global market out there, and there are substantial demands for energy, and Texas has the natural resources in the form of oil and natural gas to supply these commodities to an international market that's demanding them,” Mazur said. Supply and demand, not the president, will drive oil and gas production James Coleman, a professor of law and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill” is not policy, but political rhetoric meant to excite his base. 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