Oil and gas production in the U.S. has reached record levels under the Biden administration. The country produced an average of 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2023, breaking the previous record set in 2019. Yet oil and gas producers in the West are not satisfied. They’re claiming the Biden administration is trying to end drilling on federal public land. A closer look at the numbers shows this isn’t true.
Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma recently claimed the Biden administration is “offering as few lease sales as possible.” But with 10 federal oil and gas lease sales already having been held this year in a total of eight states — and still more to come in the last quarter of the year — there is little for the industry to complain about. Rather, the Biden administration has taken critical and long-overdue steps to reform the oil and gas leasing program, including by holding lease sales that better reflect the Bureau of Land Management’s mandate to manage public lands for multiple uses, not just oil and gas development.
As of September 2023 (the latest data available), the oil and gas industry held over 23 million acres, roughly the size of Indiana, of public land under lease. Of that, nearly half was lying idle — that’s almost 11 million acres of public land that oil and gas companies have readily available to them and have not yet tapped. In Utah, industry is sitting on 1.3 million unused acres — more than half the total land under lease in the state.
The industry’s stockpile of nonproducing public lands is due in large part to wildly irresponsible lease sales that were held under the previous administration. Between 2017 and 2021, the BLM offered up a total of over 26 million acres of public land for lease, of which companies opted to purchase only a quarter.
Thankfully, in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act included a number of fiscal reforms to the federal leasing process, including a $5 per-acre fee for lease nominations. That fee encourages the industry to nominate only those lands that companies are truly interested in leasing. In 2023, just 94,000 acres were nominated for inclusion in federal oil and gas lease sales, by far the least amount of land the industry has expressed interest in since at least 2006.
In response to the industry nominating fewer lands for lease, the BLM has right-sized its lease sales to focus on offering lands that are most likely to produce oil and gas. This year, the average per-acre lease bid has risen to over $3,000, generating a far greater return to taxpayers for every acre leased to the industry than the $291 bid per acre averaged under the previous administration.
Even with smaller sales, the oil and gas industry is still not taking advantage of all the land being offered for lease. Across the West, companies refused to bid on 15% of the acreage offered so far in 2024, proving the BLM is still giving oil and gas companies access to more land than they need. The industry’s interest in leasing in Utah has gone particularly stale. As Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma has herself noted, companies only purchased 7,000 of the 27,000 acres of public land offered to them in the state since President Joe Biden took office.
Finally, let’s look at another alleged bottleneck: permit approvals. The BLM approved 3,520 applications for permits to drill on public land in 2023 — approving 9 out of 10 applications the agency received over the year. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies are sitting on over 7,000 approved-but-unused drilling permits — a stockpile that has persisted for the past several years — making it clear any holdup in drilling is coming from industry, not the administration.
Taken together, these statistics show the claims that Biden is trying to end public lands drilling just don’t stand up to the facts: Industry is nominating acres they believe are valuable, the BLM is offering them, industry is leasing a larger percentage of the acreage offered and paying more on average per acre and the vast majority of drilling permits submitted by industry are being approved in a timely fashion. This system is generating a better return for taxpayers, while still enabling oil and gas companies to access plenty of land to produce oil.
Kate Groetzinger is the communications manager for the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization that serves as a source of accurate information, promotes responsible policies and practices, and ensures accountability at all levels to protect land, water and communities in the American West. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.