From Market Watch:
Biden administration suspends new oil, gas drilling permits on federal land
The Biden administration announced Thursday a 60-day suspension of new oil and gas leasing and drilling permits for U.S. lands and waters as officials moved quickly to reverse Trump administration policies on energy and the environment.
The suspension, part of a broad review of programs at the Department of Interior, went into effect immediately under an order signed Wednesday by Acting Interior Secretary Scott de la Vega. It follows Democratic President Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to halt new drilling on federal lands and end the leasing of publicly owned energy reserves as part of his plan to address climate change.
The order also applies to coal leases and permits, and blocks the approval of new mining plans. Land sales or exchanges and the hiring of senior-level staff at the agency also were suspended.
Biden’s move could be the first step in an eventual goal to ban all leases and permits to drill on federal land. Mineral leasing laws state that federal lands are for many uses, including extracting oil and gas, but the Democrat could set out to rewrite those laws, said Kevin Book, managing director at Clearview Energy Partners.
This was on top of killing the outstanding Keystone XL permits.
Then there was this from Forbes:
New Mexico Officials Taken Aback By Biden Assault On Oil And Gas
Officials in the state of New Mexico professed to be taken aback last week by President Joe Biden’s day-one decision to impose a 60-day moratorium on all oil and gas-related leasing and permitting actions on federal lands. It is a decision that will have major ramifications on the state budgets of New Mexico and other Western states, especially if it is extended beyond its initial term and backed up by Biden’s promised ban on hydraulic fracturing on federal lands.
A little more than 2 years ago, in September, 2018, I wrote about the half-billion dollar windfall the State of New Mexico had just received during the course of a single sale of oil and gas leases on federal lands in the state.
Some New Mexico officials are now trying to defend themselves by saying they didn’t anticipate the new President would issue such a ban, but such protests ring rather hollow given that they most assuredly did understand that Biden plans to move ahead with his fracking ban, which would for all intents and purposes have the same effect. After all, virtually 100% of the drilling activity in southeast New Mexico targets the various shale formations in the Delaware Basin, and all shale wells require a frac job in order to be productive. Thus, a ban on fracking is the same thing as a ban on leasing and drilling.
New Mexico’s Democratic Governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, said through a spokeswoman that “Certainly we all understand the critical importance of this industry to New Mexico’s bottom line and of the imperative to diversify our state economy and energy portfolio.” and that’s all fine. But the reality is that she and her administration can strive to “diversify” the state’s energy portfolio all they want, but the state will still lose hundreds of millions of dollars every year should the Biden administration succeed in shutting down her state’s oil and gas business.
New Mexico voted 54% for Biden. Not one week into this administration and their preferred candidate blew a half-billion-dollar hole right through the state’s budget.
Now I will turn to something I saw on Twitter:
This video reminds me of a conversation I had with a pipeliner that really transformed the way I think about life.
I was in this old cowboy bar in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, I’m talking it had the swinging doors, in a town of maybe a couple thousand people. https://t.co/uiaJtC443w
— Collin McLelland ?☠️ (@FracSlap) January 23, 2021
I was there watching the Spurs play in the NBA finals when a couple guys came in.
We picked up on a game of pool and I started shooting the shit with them asking what they do.
They were in town from Oregon, welding on the pipeline.
— Collin McLelland ?☠️ (@FracSlap) January 23, 2021
As the night went on one of the guys showed me a picture of his baby girl.
He said “She’s 4-years-old, she has leukemia.”
His eyes started tearing up and he said “I miss her so much.”
It hit me in the gut.
— Collin McLelland ?☠️ (@FracSlap) January 23, 2021
Seeing a grown man break down over his little girl hits different.
That’s why when I see comments from these little frail fucks on Twitter saying “it’s just a bunch of rednecks losing their jobs, who cares” I get so furious.
— Collin McLelland ?☠️ (@FracSlap) January 23, 2021
They’re good people that work their ass off and sacrifice their family to earn a living and make sure our country has reliable energy so that you can stay warm in your house and enjoy your time with your family on Christmas.
— Collin McLelland ?☠️ (@FracSlap) January 23, 2021
In one stroke of a pen, Biden killed thousands of jobs, slit open a major artery of our economy, and destabilized the Middle East.
It’s hard to appreciate just how bad this is and is going to be.
As Miguel pointed out, Biden wants California to be the model of the United States. Right now, California gas is touching $4 per gallon, almost $1.50 per gallon more than the national average. California also has some of the highest electricity prices in the country.
The harm that will happen to Americans when they end up having to pay $4 per gallon for gas, or more, and as much on electricity as they do rent or mortgage, will be devastating.
Every day I am more convinced that the Guard troops in DC are intended to be a permanent fixture to prevent the backlash from the fallout of Biden trying to wipe out everything Trump did.
I’m convinced that because of memes like this that I’ve seen.
Heres a thought- IGNORE bidens bullshit. Keep on doing what you are doing!
My wife’s best friend isn’t a liberal. She is actually apolitical and clueless about anything political. She and her boyfriend voted for Biden based on “feelings” and news stories that made Trump look like a big meanie.
She came to dinner with us on Saturday and was complaining about the increase in gas prices. I told her that she voted for Biden, and this was his doing. She tried to reply that “Oh, I don’t discuss politics.” I then replied that it doesn’t matter whether or not you do, this is the doing of YOUR presidential vote.
Every four years, the press tells us how important it is that everyone vote, but they never explain how you should be an educated voter. Therein lies the problem. There are MANY people like her: people who vote without thinking about what they are voting for. Before we were married, my wife was just like her. She still is to a smaller extent. She hates the news and hates discussing politics. She says it is too depressing and stressful, so she avoids it because “It doesn’t affect me, and there is nothing I can do about it anyway.”
Consider all the people in blue states who were absolutely shocked this summer to find out that the couldn’t just buy a fully automatic machine gun and take it right home, even though they needed it right away.
Most people tend to be ignorant of the important things until it affects them personally- and a lot of them still never learn.
For instance, the French never quite picked up that “charging a mass of people with range weapons tends to be a losing tactic, no matter how much ‘honor’, ‘elan’, or ‘fire’ your soldiers have. You’d think after one 14th century battle, things would have clicked, but they were doing that crap up until 1917.
Re NM, our beloved governor MLG has been avowedly anti fossil fuel production since she was elected. There’s no surprises here to her administration, she wants this.
I work O&G. I’m away from hone 26 weeks a year on average. One year between May 1st and September 1st, I had 3 nights in my own bed. You take the work when you can get it and and you bank the cash for when there is no work. Sone years are better than others.
This has really pissed off a lot of people; welders, pipefitters, NDE hands, equipment operators, surveyers. Yes that includes D9 operators.
I have no idea why people are surprised by this. The stance of the Democrat Party has been that any energy aside from wind/solar is ‘unsustainable’ and evil.
The fact that wind and solar cannot fill our needs is not their problem, either. They just figure they’ll buy it from someone else.
They won’t buy it from someone else. They’ll kill people at the bottom until everyone left has enough to live on. That’s why they don’t want us to know about Holodomor.
I look at it like this.
Oil, gas, coal … all fossil fuels are literally “stored solar” energy. Using them for energy is drawing on a “solar battery,” which is fine in the short term, but can’t be used indefinitely. You want a generator, not a battery, long-term.
Long-term, we have the following energy sources available to the planet: solar (includes wind and hydro, as those processes are driven by the sun); gravitational (tides); and nuclear. (Geothermal is a combo of gravitational and nuclear.)
Long-term, therefore, we need to work with this combination, and it would be nice to reserve the petrochemicals for things like, oh, plastic. But it will take time to get there, and when we do we will probably want the ability to make liquid and gaseous petrochemicals via electrochemical means – gasoline is a great fuel, oil is a great lubricant, and natural gas is great for heating homes, and all of that infrastructure exists.
So we’d best get over our abhorrence of nuclear fission (there are far better designs out there now), get serious about fusion, and work on the electropetrochemical conversion technologies. Nothing else, long-term, will cut it.
Keep in mind also the environmentalists will never be satisfied – wind turbines kill birds, solar fields disrupt local environments for desert wildlife, etc.
I’m 100% behind new energy sources. However, after 10 years in R&D I can tell you increased costs and lower profits means R&D is the first to be cut and the Government can’t subsidize all R&D. We need low cost fossil fuel energy to make R&D cost effective and feasible.
You don’t get from here to the Jetsons by taking a short cut through the Flintstones.
Agreed, of course.
“get serious about fusion” — well, lots of governments have sunk oodles of money into that. The trouble, as Prof. Larry Lidsky points out (http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf) is that thermonuclear fusion is just barely possible with extremely large machines, much larger and thus vastly more expensive than fission reactors. And contrary to marketing, those machines are in no way “clean energy” — they produce large quantities of dangerously radioactive materials, including in their structural elements. And the stored energy in the magnets makes them extremely dangerous (subject to substantial explosions) if the superconductivity cooling system were to fail.
Bussard’s “polywell” system is a different matter, but that one is a system that doesn’t seem to get any serious investment.
I agree with your points about typical fusion system concepts – they are large, expensive, dangerous and more of a rad waste hazard than conventional fission reactors.
Thing is, their fuel – if we can get them working – is more abundant and readily available than for fission, especially if we can do D-D or H-D and not need T. (Breeder reactors and other waste-burner designs notwithstanding.) And the associated proliferation issues with fusion do include so-called “dirty bombs” from the waste, but don’t include atomic bombs. That for me is also a plus.
True, but T-D is the only system that seems to be under consideration in the Big Government projects. D-D is far harder. H-D? Don’t know that one. Bussard mentions a nice H + 11B system that produces only fast alphas at fairly consistent energies — no neutrons — so you can generate electricity directly by capturing those charged particles. Neat, efficient, clean. But impossible in thermal fusion systems, the inherent losses mean no unity gain operation is possible. Possible in a Polywell, if it can be scaled up quite a lot beyond the desktop test units that exist so far.
Hydrogen-Deuterium, simply for ease of getting half the fuel. I don’t know of a proposed reactor concept that makes use of it. H-H would be ideal of course, from an availability standpoint, and we have an operating practical example … but the scale-down is challenging.
I don’t see H-D as a reactor fuel. “Howstuffworks” doesn’t, not that its article is all that accurate to begin with. Neither does Wikipedia, though it does list esoteric options like ones involving 3He (and also the P-11B option).
The comments about NM and the Oil Patch are all correct. Her Imperial Highness Lujan Gresham stated from her election campaign forward that she wants oil, gas, and coal in NM to go away forever. She may be making poor-me faces in public (she and her administration in Santa Fe are cowardly and spiteful), but I can’t help thinking that inwardly, she is gloating.
A 60 day moratorium on permits is not just stopping new wells. Oil, gas, well, any work that requires permitting has permit amendments, changes, or new permits getting filed all the time. An active project may have to get any number of new permits as the project goes on.
This will not just impact new oil and gas leases, it will likely screw up existing wells.
As for NM going 54% Biden, I have a bridge to sell you.
What tipped NM (and two of our three congressional districts) were Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Cruces, each of which uses and trusts Dominion machines, ballot box stuffing, and any other method by which they can ensure the “right” person “wins.”
Our district flipped red, in large part due to the previous occupant claiming to be a moderate and working with Trump (pissing off the libs) while walking hand in hand with the “Squad” (pissing off everyone else). There was not enough margin of cheat to ensure her win this time around.
Even the reservations are getting pissed at Wuhan Lujan, and that is being felt down-ballot in any race that does not receive the special ministrations of the electioneering machine.
I would wager NM probably (in an honest election) would go 55% red, 45% blue.
“Grandpa, how did people light their homes, before candles?”
“Electricity.”