President Trump’s declaration of an energy emergency has helped clear hurdles and push the U.S. to the fastest rate of new oil and gas drilling permits in years, running 44% ahead of the Biden administration at the same point in time.
As of June 18, the Interior Department had approved 2,990 permits on federal and Indian lands, compared to 2,071 for President Biden in 2021, according to government data shared with The Washington Times.
That works out to roughly 600 permits a month, a pace that hasn’t been seen in nearly two decades, as the department reached to fulfill Mr. Trump’s mandate to “drill, baby, drill.”
Energy advocates said the Trump team is trying to erase years of Biden inaction and get more oil and gas development in the pipeline.
“These permitting figures underscore a shift in this administration’s energy strategy — from the Biden administration’s approach, which used a range of tools to constrain oil and gas production, to one that allows producers greater freedom and flexibility to make production decisions based on market conditions,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research.
Mr. Trump is eager to keep things going.
“To The Department of Energy: Drill, Baby, Drill!!! And I mean now!!!” he said on social media earlier this week, lapsing into periodic all-capital letters.
It’s a vow he made in his inaugural address, too.
At that time, in the transition from Mr. Biden, the U.S. was already the global leader in oil production, producing more crude than any other country, ever.
But Mr. Trump declared an energy emergency nonetheless, saying Americans were still vulnerable to high energy prices and the U.S. was still too dependent on foreign sources.
He revoked some environmental restrictions, ordered a review of others, and called for departments to streamline the permitting process.
The Interior Department then announced new emergency permitting reforms in April that it said would reduce the process down to 28 days.
It averaged more than 250 days under President Biden, according to Reuters. The average during the first Trump administration was 172 days.
Federal lands count for about a quarter of U.S. crude oil production and a tenth of natural gas.
The Interior Department, which didn’t respond to an inquiry for this article, auctions off leases of land for exploration and then, if a parcel is judged to be commercially viable, the department can approve a permit for drilling.
New techniques in the last two decades have made previously unviable land now candidates for drilling, reversing a decades-long slide and catapulting the U.S. to the global leader in oil and gas production.
The Biden administration’s record on oil had proved deeply divisive — and somewhat tough to characterize.
Mr. Biden in 2020 promised that there would be “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, Period, Period.”
But in fact, even as he promoted and pumped hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money into renewable energy, his Interior Department approved more drilling permits than the first Trump administration.
Experts said, however, that was largely on land previously leased by the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden moved to shut down new leases.
A 2021 leasing “pause” was blocked by a federal court but that didn’t stop the administration’s slow-roll of lease auctions anyway.
He also moved to cancel some leases in places like Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That 2024 decision was overturned by a federal judge three months ago.
“The Biden guys kept saying that under their watch there was record drilling, but that was in spite of the administration, not because of it,” Mr. Pyle said. “Biden’s de facto moratorium on leasing will impact future development, which is why it is important for President Trump to open up as much available acres as possible so that we can get back on track.”
Support for Biden-style renewable fuel programs has slipped in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center.
In data released earlier this month, Pew said those who say expanding solar power has dropped from 90% in 2020 to 77% this year. Expanding wind and solar instead of fossil fuels has toppled from 79% to a 60% proposition — still a majority, but well less than what it was five years ago.
