The Myth of Restarting Domestic Oil & Gas Production

You can’t watch a newscast these days without seeing a Senator or Congressman or some other talking head insist that the actions of the current Administration in curtailing domestic oil and gas production and pipelines were unwise and that oil and gas production must be restarted immediately.

The posture of the current President towards domestic oil and gas production has certainly been irrational, to say the least. In attempting to appease the far left of the Democratic Party, Biden has not only crippled energy production, he has created devastating inflation and a critically dangerous national security situation. Oil and gas is not just essential for transportation, it is a component of many of the products we use on a daily basis. In addition, people may not realize that natural gas is essential for creating fertilizer. American farmers have begun publicly warning of food shortages beginning this summer and fall because of the inability to obtain fertilizer. Since Biden is doing this while importing Russian oil and refusing to ban the import of Russian oil as a sanction for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one might logically ask just who side he is on?

The problem is that even if Biden woke up tomorrow and removed all the impediments to domestic oil and gas production, there is no switch that gets thrown which results in sudden production. Instead, there is a substantial lead time to bring wells back online and into production. Drilling new wells, especially horizontal wells, takes time. More importantly, domestic oil and gas producers don’t trust the dementia-fueled irrationality of Biden and his advisors. They are not going to incur the considerable expense of drilling new wells, much less bringing existing wells back online, until there is someone with a logical and coherent and rational energy policy in the White House. Finally, even if and gas wells were to be allowed to be restarted and new wells could be drilled, we do not have sufficient pipeline capacity to get the oil and gas to refineries.

All of this portends a very grim time ahead for all of us.