After campaigning on rhetoric of “Drill, Baby, Drill!” one of the first things that President-elect Trump and Republicans are expected to do when they take office next week is to accelerate the approval of permits to drill for oil and gas on federal land.

When GOP Representative Mike Johnson was re-elected Speaker of the House on Jan. 3, he said: “As leaders of a nation with vast natural resources that God has blessed us with, it’s our duty to restore America’s energy dominance. And that’s what we’ll do. …We’re going to expedite new drilling permits.”  

But more drilling permits don’t appear to be needed. That’s because there are more than 6,000 approved permits for oil and gas companies to drill on federal lands that are available but sitting idle and not being used, according to the most recent available records of the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Millions of acres of federal lands that have been leased to oil and gas companies for drilling are also not being used, because global market conditions do not make investments in new oil drilling profitable right now, according to BLM and interviews with oil and gas industry experts.

“The bottom line for what drives investment [in oil production] in the U.S. is profitability, and that is primarily driven by the price of oil, with government policy playing an important but secondary role to the economics of the world oil market and the price of oil,” said Mark Finley, former senior economist at BP and now an oil and gas industry expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Finley said that accelerating the approval of drilling permits could improve the profitability of oil companies, because time is money and the less time companies spend on the process of obtaining permits means less money spent. But he doubts that quicker permitting will produce more oil or gas or make fuel cheaper for consumers, despite Trump’s promises to cut energy prices in half.  

“There is actually not a lot that any U.S. president can do to impact prices at the pump and the production of crude oil, because it’s a global marketplace,” Finley said.

It can take several months for an oil and gas company to obtain a drilling permit on federal land.  The average time for a permit approval by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages public lands, mostly in the Western States and Alaska, in the first three years of Biden’s administration was 258 days – about 8.5 months. That was almost three months longer than the average of 172 days during the first three years of Trump's presidency.   

However, that longer review period under Biden did not translate to significantly fewer drilling permits being approved or less oil being pumped out of federal lands. In fact, BLM approved almost as many drilling permits during Biden’s term (13,658 permits) as during the Trump Administration (14,608), according to data on the BLM website.

And despite President Biden’s promises to take action against climate change, the amount of oil pumped out of federal lands during his term -- more than 1.5 billion barrels -- was almost double the amount during the Trump administration, according to BLM.

Although Biden signed legislation to subsidize clean energy and electric cars, oil companies also thrived during his administration.  ExxonMobil, for example, enjoyed record-breaking profits of $56 billion in 2022.

Given this record of growth, Professor Anthony Kovscek, an oil and gas industry expert and professor at Stanford University, said he is skeptical that Trump’s proposal to “expedite” the permitting of drilling on federal lands will have any meaningful impact on U.S. oil and gas production.

“The U.S. has been the world’s leading producer of oil for about the last decade and produces more oil annually than any time in its history,” Kovscek said. “Both the Biden and first Trump administrations approved many, many drilling permits through their regular processes. It is hard to conclude that permits for drilling on federal lands are a bottleneck for production of oil or gas right now.”

A 2021 report by the Bureau of Land Management suggested that the agency is approving too many permits and leases for drilling too quickly. The report suggested that the industry doesn’t even need many of the leases, because they often buy the leases to inflate their balance sheets and flip leases to other companies, rather than for drilling for fuel. About half of the 26 million acres of drilling leases that companies obtained on federal land at the time of the report were not being used to produce oil or gas.

The report warned that excessive leasing and permitting will “encourage speculators to purchase leases with the intent of waiting for increases in resource prices, adding assets to their balance sheets, or even reselling leases at a profit rather than attempting to produce oil or gas.”

Taylor McKinnon, Southwest Director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said that House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call on Jan. 3 to “expedite” the permit approval process for drilling makes no sense.

“If industry was actually constrained by the permit approval process, there wouldn’t be more than 6,000 permits sitting on the shelf being unused. It’s just a hollow complaint by the industry,” said McKinnon.

Despite this background, Trump has been saying publicly that it will be a top priority for his administration to accelerate permitting reviews and permit approvals of major projects of all kinds.

Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, last month: “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!”

Drew McConville, a senior fellow Center for American Progress who studies public lands, said that there is nothing wrong with examining the process of reviewing drilling permits and making the decision-making process more efficient.  

But he added: “The problem comes when you lean on career civil servants to spit out permits as quickly as possible. What gets sacrificed is consideration of the impacts to wildlife and water quality and opportunities for the public to weigh in.”

With an accelerated review process, McConville noted, there is less input from local people who live near the federal lands being targeted for drilling and often suffer from the noise and air and water pollution caused by drilling.

Only a small percentage of oil and gas produced in the U.S. – about 11 or 12 percent – comes from federal lands, with the vast majority extracted from private property.  

For this reason, Trump’s promises of accelerating permits for drilling on public lands is unlikely to have much influence on overall oil production or consumer prices for fuel, said Robert K. Kaufmann, a professor of environmental science at Boston University and expert on the oil and gas industry.

“They say we are going to ‘drill baby drill,’ and it sounds great on the campaign trail,” Kaufmann said. “But now that Trump is about to be back in power, it’s just not going to make much of a difference relative to events in the international oil market that are completely out of any administration’s control.”

Lead photo: Well pads along the Little Missouri River in North Dakota. Photo by Chris Boyer, Kestrel Aerial Services, Inc.