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The Unregulated Podcast #74: Biden’s Blame Game

March 11, 2022 by Leave a Comment

On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna discuss Biden’s attempts at deflecting blame for run-away inflation and the future prospects of the so-called “energy-transition” movement.

Links:

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Jen Psaki Doubles Down On Lies Against American Energy Producers

March 10, 2022 by Leave a Comment

When asked by a news correspondent this month if President Biden intended to reverse course and reinstate pro-America energy policies, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded that there are 9,000 approved oil leases that the oil companies are not tapping into currently. But, as American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers indicates, her statement amounts to factual distortion. “Just because you have a lease doesn’t mean there’s actually oil and gas in that lease, and there has to be a lot of development that occurs between the leasing and then ultimately permitting for that acreage to be productive,” Sommers said. In fact, the industry is using a higher percentage of federal onshore and offshore leases than at any time in the past, and it is continuing to increase production to meet surging demand.

The U.S. oil industry has both developed and undeveloped leases and it pays the government fees for renting them, regardless of whether oil and gas is eventually found and produced. It generally takes 7 to 10 years for oil companies to determine whether a lease will become productive and for them to invest in the infrastructure that is needed to produce the oil. With the Biden administration trying to push banks away from funding oil and gas projects and instead spend money on renewable energy, it is no wonder that the industry is hesitating to make the investment needed. Besides the need to obtain necessary capital to make the investment, the oil industry is faced with the uncertainty caused by Biden and his administration about imposing new taxes and regulations on the industry that were contained in the Build Back Better Bill. Further, the Department of Interior agreed with upping the royalty rates on the industry when they performed the review Biden requested when he placed the ban on new oil and drilling on public lands.

Because Biden touted his anti-oil and gas policies during his campaign for the Presidency, there was a flurry of lease purchases in 2020, despite record-breaking low – and even negative – oil prices resulting from the demand destruction due to the COVID lockdown. Those fears were justified as President Biden shut down leasing activities on his first day in office, and his leasing moratorium continues, despite a judge indicating that only Congress had the authority to approve not holding lease sales since Federal laws required the lease sales. Finally bowing to the law and conducting one lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico in the fall, another judge invalidated it on the grounds that the government had failed to take climate change into consideration. Biden’s administration has done nothing to contest that judgment, and in fact was appealing the original judge’s order the same week as the lease sale. To Biden and his administration, it is better to import oil from OPEC+ (the + is mainly Russia), Venezuela or Iran than to help the U.S. oil industry.

In the same press conference that Psaki misrepresented the 9000 leases, she falsely claimed Joe Biden was not funding the Russian war effort by continuing to import over 650,000 barrels of oil from Russia every day (about 8 percent of U.S. oil imports and 3 percent of oil consumption). At $120 a barrel that equates to $78 million a day from the United States to Russia alone. As the world’s third-largest oil producer providing more than 10 percent of global supply, Russia raked in $119 billion in resource revenues last year.

Due to pressure from Congress, Biden announced a ban on oil, liquefied natural gas and coal imports from Russia, signing an executive order to that effect on March 8. The day before, a bipartisan group of American lawmakers agreed to move ahead with legislation that would ban Russian energy imports in the United States and suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus. Some European countries, which are highly dependent on Russian energy, have expressed a willingness to reduce their reliance on those imports, as well. Biden’s order blocks any new purchases of those energy products and winds down the deliveries of existing purchases that have already been contracted for. The White House said the action also bans new U.S. investment in Russia’s energy sector and prohibits Americans from participating in foreign investments that flow into that sector in Russia. China, which controls the minerals necessary for Biden’s “green energy transition,” immediately stepped into that space.

Gasoline prices have now surpassed their high in 2008, reaching an average of $4.17 a gallon. But, that is what Biden wants as his Secretary of Energy Granholm indicated—rising oil, natural gas and electricity prices benefit the transition to renewable fuels and Biden’s energy agenda.

Conclusion

The Biden administration and particularly Jen Psaki need to better understand the oil industry and energy markets so that they stop spouting misleading statements about oil leases and other industry-related subjects. The reason there are 9,000 undeveloped oil leases is because companies do not want to invest the massive amounts of money and manpower necessary to drill for oil when the Biden administration is constantly threatening to impose new or increasing taxes, fees and regulations on the industry, and “working like the devil” through all the financial institutions to cut off their funding and “bankrupt them.” With the ban on lease sales on federal lands, Biden has shown the U.S. oil industry through his actions that he does not want to do business with them. He would rather import oil from OPEC, Venezuela and Iran than to further develop the U.S. oil industry. His actions speak louder than his words.

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Tom Pyle to Congress: Rising Prices A Feature of “Green” Policies, Not A Bug

March 8, 2022 by 1 Comment

Tuesday, March 8, AEA president Tom Pyle provided testimony before a hearing by The Subcommittee on Energy of the Committee on Energy and Commerce titled: Charging Forward: Securing American Manufacturing and Our EV Future.

Tom’s full written testimony is available here. A video of the hearing can be viewed below.

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Wake Up Biden: Need to Change Your Anti-American Energy Policies

March 8, 2022 by Leave a Comment

A survey conducted by Morning Consult found 90 percent of U.S. voters favor domestic energy development over foreign imports. In addition, more than 80 percent of respondents said they believed domestic oil and natural gas production would boost energy security for the United States and its allies, reduce energy costs, and help preserve U.S. leadership in times of uncertainty. Another survey conducted by the Pew Center found that 67 percent of Americans want a mix of fossil fuel and renewable energy resources. Americans generally do not want a complete break with fossil fuels and foresee unexpected problems in a major transition to renewable energy. That is despite 69 percent of Americans favoring the United States taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050, a key component of President Joe Biden’s climate and energy policy. Economic concerns are forefront in the minds of Americans when asked about what a transition away from fossil fuels would mean for them.

Biden and his cohorts want to blame rising oil and gasoline prices on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While some suppliers are no longer buying oil from Russia, reducing supply and causing the most recent increase in prices, it is Biden’s anti-oil and gas policies that have caused the initial shortage of oil supplies and the price increases last year when gasoline prices increased by $1 over the course of Biden’s first year in office. On his first days in office, he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would provide oil from our Canadian neighbor—an oil grade that U.S. refineries need, and placed a ban on leasing oil and gas on federal lands while he determined how much to increase fees on oil and gas drilling. His administration has also banned oil production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Naval Petroleum Reserve—Alaska. He has placed restrictions on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that will probably kill their approval of most new natural gas pipelines and he has asked banks to not support future oil and gas projects. Markets look for signals, and all the signals coming from the Biden administration about increasing domestic production have been flashing red lights.

Biden now claims he is doing all he can to lower the rising gasoline and oil prices, but all he has done is beg OPEC+ (“+” stands for Russia) for more oil production and asked our allies to release oil from their strategic petroleum reserves. But the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves is just a drop in the bucket of the oil that is needed and does nothing to increase supplies meaningfully, and is thus of little benefit to reducing prices. Now, his administration is looking to get oil from Venezuela—a country where sanctions have been applied for years and socialist government policies have destroyed oil producing capabilities. Biden’s actions result in energy being harder to produce and more challenging to discover. Therefore, gasoline and home heating prices are higher than they have been in quite some time. But Biden has not made the connection between his disastrous policies and the rise of energy prices. Instead, he asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether or not energy companies are gouging their prices to squeeze more money out of consumers. But, that was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, he has another scapegoat on which to blame high and rising prices.

On Sunday, oil price surged to $139 a barrel with the market reacting to supply disruptions stemming from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the possibility of a ban on Russian oil and natural gas. West Texas Intermediate crude futures, the U.S. oil benchmark, at one point spiked to $130.50 Sunday evening—its highest level since July 2008. The U.S. and its allies are considering banning Russian oil and natural gas imports, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. The U.S. average for a gallon of gas topped $4 on Sunday, according to AAA. The cost of oil accounts for more than 50 percent of the cost of gasoline. The last time gasoline prices were this high was in 2008 when gasoline rose to a record $4.11 a gallon, which equates to about $5.20 a barrel today adjusted for inflation. High gas prices are helping to feed inflation, which reached a 40-year high in January.

These prices are moving in the direction that President Biden and his administration apparently want. According to The Last Refuge:

“During a U.S. Department of Energy roundtable, on February 28, 2022, launching the Biden administration’s Better Climate Challenge initiative, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm explained the core of the Biden energy policy. Underneath all the blocks to oil and gas development, is the larger objective to transition away from fossil fuels to Green New Deal climate change initiatives. $10/gal gasoline is a feature, it is part of the plan. Rising electricity rates and massive increases in home heating and cooling costs are part of the plan. The downstream impacts of inflation inside the entire U.S. economy are structural issues to be managed. The financial pain to the U.S. citizen is the biggest problem they need to manage. Within this ‘transition’ process, the administration needs something they can point to as a false justification. That’s where the Ukraine-Russia conflict serves their current interests. The Biden team need Americans to blame something or someone else, as they execute this policy. First it was COVID, now it’s Vladimir Putin. All of this is being done on purpose.”

Were it not for Biden’s plan to rid the United States of fossil fuels by escalating prices out of sight, the United States would be already producing more oil and finding more oil for development. The United States has 285 years of technically recoverable oil, and more oil would be found if oil companies were allowed to open new leases and explore for it. The United States would also be on its way to getting more oil from neighboring Canada if the Obama-Biden administration did not hold the Keystone XL pipeline hostage and the Biden-Harris administration did not cancel the permit for the pipeline to cross the U.S.-Canadian border. The permit for the Keystone XL pipeline was filed in 2008—plenty of time to have built it since it only took 3 to build the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, a larger and more challenging project.

Under the Trump administration, the United States became energy independent—a goal that U.S. governments wanted to reach for decades. The United States had become the world’s leading oil and natural gas producer, thanks to the American energy renaissance, and Americans were reaping its benefits from low gasoline prices, inexpensive natural gas home heating, and nearly flat electricity prices, even as the United States reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other nation. But the Biden administration’s anti-oil and gas policies are making those realities go away as it transitions the U.S. economy to a net-zero carbon-based economy. The policies of the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress have increased energy prices and will continue to do so as more and more of these negative policies are implemented. Americans need to understand the dynamics involved with oil production and realize that Biden is not helping with his anti-oil and gas policies.

*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.

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Jen Psaki Wrong About Gas Prices, Oil Production, And Basically Everything Else

March 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment

The Biden administration does not like U.S. energy production. That is the inescapable conclusion from their actions over the past year. Last summer they called on OPEC + (the most important part of the “plus” is Russia) to increase oil production. Recently, reports are that they are trying to get a deal with Iran that would put Iranian oil on the global market and that they met with Venezuela to possibly end sanctions on it and put Venezuelan oil on the global market. On Sunday, there was a new report of sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to make nice with the Saudis to put more oil on the global market.

What the Biden administration has not done is meet with domestic oil and gas producers to try and work to increase domestic production, nor have they met with the Canadians to try to increase Canadian oil production and exports to the United States. Canada is our top importing partner and has enormous quantities of oil.

The White House is feeling the pressure of its anti-North American energy policy and on Sunday afternoon, Jen Psaki, the White House Press Secretary again took to Twitter to try to argue that U.S. domestic oil production does not really matter.

Ms. Psaki begins:

She continues:

It is certainly true that oil and natural gas production is increasing. As we will explain below, that is not because of the federal government, but in spite of it. It is also true that oil is a globally-traded commodity and that the impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will increase oil and gas prices globally.

We will also note that the position of the United States as a net exporter of petroleum and petroleum products would have been considered a fantasy by the experts when Ms. Psaki worked for President Obama. While running for re-election, President Obama said that “we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices” and that if we are going to avoid high gas prices every few years, we will need an all-of-the-above strategy. But President Obama was completely wrong. Between 2012, when he made these claims on the campaign trail and 2019, U.S. domestic oil production doubled and average gasoline prices fell by 27 percent from $3.680 a gallon in 2012 to $2.691 a gallon in 2019.

Back to Ms. Psaki:

Contrary to Ms. Psaki’s claims, oil and gas companies have faced tremendous pressure in recent years to, as the Wall Street Journal put it “shore up balance sheets rather than to boost production.” The WSJ explained:

The restraint demanded by investors stands in contrast to previous periods of breakneck growth in U.S. production. It raises the prospect that the nation’s output—which has been largely flat this year—may not rise to offset a recovery in demand as major economies roll back coronavirus restrictions.

Companies are refraining from deploying money to raise output, which in turn is tightening the balance between supply and demand, said Lex Maultsby, a managing director for leveraged finance at Bank of America. “Most of the debt financings are principally extending debt maturities and not being used to fund…production growth.”

Also, as David Blackmon, Senior Contributor at Forbes explained just last month, “Also limiting any response is the reality that many big producers remain intimidated by no-growth pressure from the ESG investor groups like BlackRock.” To understand this, Ms. Psaki should ask fellow high-ranking White House staffer Brian Deese, the current Director of the National Economic Council and former Global Head of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock.

There certainly has been a shortage of capital to drill more wells, but with the price of oil skyrocketing that may change somewhat.

Back to Ms. Psaki:

There are important reasons why the vast majority of domestic oil production occurs on non-federal lands (private and state lands). In 2009, at the start of the Obama administration (the Obama administration was as anti-oil and gas production as the Biden administration) production on federal lands totaled 35.7 percent of total domestic oil production. However, at the end of the Obama administration in 2016, federal lands only contributed 23.7 percent of total domestic oil production.

The reality is that federal lands vastly underperform on oil and gas production versus state and private lands because the federal government owns the majority of the mineral estate. The federal mineral estate contains 2.46 billion acres, made up of 1.76 billion acres in the Outer Continental Shelf and 700 million onshore lands. The state and private land mineral estate is around 1.5 billion acres by comparison. Yet the vast majority of our oil and natural gas comes from private and state lands.

Back to Psaki:

Because oil and natural gas are a globally-traded commodities, the United States is not completely “insulated” from price volatility, but over the past decade, U.S. oil production has had a significant moderating influence on global oil prices. From 2010 through 2019, global total petroleum (and other liquids) production increased by 12.1 million barrels a day. For the same time period, U.S. total petroleum (and other liquids) production increased by 9.77 million barrels a day.  In other words, 81 percent of the increase in global oil production over the past 10 years came from the United States. For comparison, Russia’s total production in 2021 was 10.52 million barrels per day.

This dramatic increase in production has created far more energy security in the United States than in places such as Germany and the rest of the EU.

Germany’s energy policies are the policies the Biden administration would like to emulate. Talking about energy policy, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated at the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue that “We are playing catch up with Germany! Although the U.S. may make different choices in how we approach our own energy transition, you and other EU parties have already made some incredible progress.”

Natural gas prices are currently over 10 times higher in Europe than the United States. Electricity and natural gas rates are expected to climb by 50 percent this year in Europe and electricity prices were already far higher in Europe than in the United States. Electricity rates in Germany are about 39 U.S. cents per kWh, in Denmark about 34 U.S. cents per kWh, and in the U.K. about 27 U.S. cents per kWh.  Compare that to less than 13 U.S. cents per kWh in the United States.

Where do people have greater energy security? In the United States where we have dramatically increased oil and natural gas production or in Europe with declining oil and natural gas production?

Lastly, Psaki argues that “the President is so focused on deploying clean energy technologies that don’t require fossil fuels bought and sold on the global market, which will always be vulnerable to bad actors.” Again, Psaki is completely mistaken.

The production and processing of that are necessary for these “clean energy technologies” are far more geographically concentrated than oil and natural gas production as the International Energy Agency illustrated with this chart last year:

Source: The International Energy Agency

In terms of processing the minerals necessary for things such as batteries and electric vehicles, China far surpasses other countries.  China dominates the rest of the world in copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth processing.

Source: The International Energy Agency

The United States could, of course, mine and process many of those materials. But mines typically take a decade or more to permit, and an honest assessment of the situation makes it apparent that the Biden administration has no interest in permitting new mines having recently rejected the Twin Metals mine in Minnesota and been sturdy opponents of other mines, including Pebble, Rosemont, and others. The Biden administration is unlikely to approve mines at all, and certainly not anywhere near the number that we would need to reduce our dependence on China.

Conclusion:

Press Secretary Jen Psaki did as good a job as she could do to spin the Biden administration’s anti-energy agenda. The reality is that the United States has greater energy security today because of dramatically higher domestic oil and natural gas production and not because of European-style subsidies and mandates for renewable energy that led to their energy weakness currently being exploited by Russia. Now only that, but the European-style energy policies the administration wants to pursue would make the United States far more dependent on China than we have ever been on oil from OPEC.

It is a sad state of affairs when the White House continues to try to get more oil from Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia on the market instead of working to get more oil produced here in the largest oil and natural gas producing country in the world, and blocks pipelines from our largest source of imports, our ally and friend Canada. She is, however, right about this: “it is time to move past the talking points and ground this discussion in facts.” We are happy to oblige.

*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.

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The Unregulated Podcast #73: Go Get Him!

March 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment

On this week’s episode of The Unreglated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna preview the future of “green” policy in light of the harsh realities exposed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and give a recapp of Biden’s State of the Union Address.

Links:

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Natural Gas Pipeline Capacity Additions Decrease in 2021

March 3, 2022 by Leave a Comment

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Natural Gas Pipeline Projects Tracker, in 2021, 7.44 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of interstate natural gas pipeline capacity was added in the United States. This was the lowest amount of added capacity since 2016. The vast majority of new interstate natural gas pipeline capacity was added to transport natural gas within Texas and around the Gulf Coast. 

Source: Energy Information Administration

As the chart above shows, U.S. natural gas interstate pipeline additions peaked in 2018 during the Trump administration. The recent decline in additional capacity can be attributed to two primary factors: strained economic growth due to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as an increase in regulatory burdens on new pipeline construction across all levels of government. 

The lack of new natural gas pipeline construction has been particularly costly in the Northeast, where environmental politics has prevented the construction of new natural gas pipelines in recent years. Both oil and natural gas pipeline capacity is being limited, resulting in bottlenecks that either raise prices when demand is high such as in the Northeast during cold winters or cause supply prices to be discounted. 

New York’s anti-natural gas policies are particularly noteworthy as their impact creates spillover effects to much of the Northeast. In 2014, Governor Cuomo banned hydraulic fracking in the state, which would have helped produce natural gas from the state’s own deposits of shale gas. On top of this, his administration also denied permits for new pipelines, which, if they had been approved, would have brought inexpensive supplies of natural gas from neighboring Pennsylvania. 

The combination of these anti-pipeline policies with other market-distorting policies such as the Jones Act have further implications beyond higher energy prices for consumers in the Northeast. As I noted several years ago, policies that block American energy development also have important foreign policy implications. 

Today, with the renewed interest in building a resilient energy supply chain, voters and politicians should seriously reconsider policies that block the development of pipelines as well as other policies that hinder the development of energy resources in the U.S. As current events in Europe have demonstrated, we can no longer afford an approach to energy policy that is defined by a monomaniacal obsession with carbon dioxide emissions. We should reject central planning as the core ethos of American energy policy as it will only lead to higher energy prices for consumers and greater instability. The U.S. needs to get serious about energy policy and recognize that tradeoffs abound when determining how to maintain access to affordable and reliable energy.

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Contrary To Biden’s SOTU Speech, His Policies Are Behind Rising Energy Prices

March 2, 2022 by Leave a Comment

President Biden used his State of the Union Address to blame everyone and everything else for rising energy prices except his own anti-production policies.

Natural gas prices have escalated because of President Biden’s anti-oil and gas policies that are limiting pipeline infrastructure and increased production on federal lands, while the promise of pending regulatory actions add uncertainty to investments. As soon as Biden got inaugurated, he started implementing his domestic anti-oil and gas policies by pausing lease sales on federal lands. Despite a federal judge overturning his pause, only one lease sale has been conducted offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and that lease sale was later overturned because Biden’s Department of Interior failed to consider climate change sufficiently in setting up the lease sale. Immediately prior to the sale, the administration appealed the judge’s decision ordering sales to be conducted.

Further, Biden’s appointees to the Federal Energy Commission now indicate that they will use climate change in their assessment of future natural gas pipeline projects. In a 3-2 vote divided along party lines, commission members changed the policy that lays out the process for reviewing and approving applications for new natural-gas pipeline projects to take into consideration a project’s environmental impact and the steps a developer has taken to limit that impact. In determining whether a project is in the public interest, FERC will examine greenhouse gas emissions from the project’s construction and operations — as well as the emissions from when the gas is ultimately burned to generate electricity. The new guidance will be applied immediately, despite it being issued only on an interim basis while the agency accepts public comments, and may make changes later based on the feedback. Subjecting project applications that have been pending for years to the new policies established today creates additional uncertainty for those pending projects and significant delays for much-needed infrastructure.

The new FERC guidance will make even more difficult to construct natural gas pipelines. Just from environmental opposition and court cases, six of the last seven planned interstate pipeline projects to transport natural gas throughout the east have been paused or canceled. Because of insufficient pipeline infrastructure, the Northeast must import natural gas from Russia rather than obtaining it from neighboring Pennsylvania, where natural gas prices are $3.50. The average natural gas price in Massachusetts during December was $8.38 per million British thermal units—up 96.7 percent from the December 2020 average Massachusetts natural gas price of $4.26 per million Btu. Russia’s war on Ukraine exacerbates these issues.

Democratic Senators have recently called on the Department of Energy to cut exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in an attempt to reduce prices. But, because natural gas prices are set regionally, most LNG exports would have no impact on the high natural gas prices in New England. Also, due to the Jones Act, LNG from the U.S. Gulf Coast cannot be shipped to New England in lieu of the Russian LNG because U.S. oil and natural gas must be shipped by U.S. tankers, which the United States does not own.

Further, President Biden has promised “freedom gas” to Europe as their energy prices have exploded. Natural gas in Europe is priced at the equivalent of $180 per barrel oil. According to the White House, “The United States and the EU are working jointly towards continued, sufficient, and timely supply of natural gas to the EU from diverse sources across the globe to avoid supply shocks…. The United States is already the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU.” A flotilla of LNG carriers have steamed to Europe from the United States to help rescue the U.K. and other European nations who face shortages of natural gas due to Russian cutbacks and poor planning, from racing into intermittent wind and solar power while cutting back on coal and nuclear power. Last January, the United States sent about 20 percent of its LNG cargoes to Europe. This January, it has sent nearly 70 percent.

As Europe confronts the possibility of a serious supply disruption amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the United States is trying to help Europe secure emergency gas supplies. But, Europe has limited LNG facilities to import more as it wanted the cheaper natural gas piped from Russia, who supplies 40 percent of the continent’s natural gas. If Russian supplies are further cut off this spring, Europe would pay a heavy price since it remains dependent on Russian gas to heat homes and generate electricity despite the shipments of U.S. LNG. While some European countries, such as Poland, have built LNG terminals, Germany has not. Proposed LNG import facilities in Germany have been delayed as Russia built a new pipeline—Nord Stream 2—that would double Russian gas exported to Germany.

Conclusion

U.S. natural gas prices in the Northeast face more upward pressure amid Russia’s war on Ukraine because there is insufficient pipeline infrastructure for the Northeast to get its natural gas from neighboring Pennsylvania, forcing it to get LNG deliveries from Russia. While President Biden is supplying Europe with freedom gas and appealing to Qatar for more gas supplies to Europe, he has placed a pause on lease sales of oil and natural gas on federal lands in the United States and has appointed FERC commissioners who are making it even more difficult to construct natural gas pipelines in the United States. His restrictions have resulted in high heating prices this winter, particularly in the Northeast, and they are only bound to get worse as Biden continues to implement his anti-energy policies.

*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.

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Will Biden Return to 50 Years of Failed Energy Policy?

March 1, 2022 by Leave a Comment

For the last fifty years, with one notable exception, U.S. presidents have used their State of the Union Address to push for expensive, unreliable, and politically motivated sources of energy.

Contact The White House

This year it is likely Joe Biden will return to this trend in his address to the nation and champion his so-called “Build Back Better” agenda which would give BILLIONS of dollars to special interest groups working to make energy MORE EXPENSIVE and LESS RELIABLE for American families! 

After catching up on the history of presidential pandering during the SOTU from our short video, send Biden a message telling him enough is enough!

President Trump proved what American energy producers are capable of and now it’s time to remind the current administration we won’t go back to paying $4.00 a gallon gas and importing foreign energy quietly!

The American Energy Alliance calls on everyone who supports free markets and affordable energy to contact Joe Biden and demand he rejects 50 years of failed energy policy!

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AEA Statement on President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address

March 1, 2022 by Leave a Comment

“It is past time to give American consumers a break.  American energy workers deserve a chance to go to work and provide the energy we need to restore the nation to its potential and its position in the world.  Mr. President, you need to reverse your war on American energy.”

– Tom Pyle, AEA President

WASHINGTON DC (March 1, 2022) – The American Energy Alliance (AEA), the country’s premier pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, and free-market energy organization, has a direct message for President Joe Biden in advance of his State of the Union address.

AEA President Tom Pyle issued the following statement:

Mr. President,

Considering the attacks of Vladimir Putin’s Russia on Ukraine, you have an obligation to direct your administration to cease your attacks on America’s energy producers who are willing and have proven themselves capable of meeting our energy, economic, and national security needs.  A stronger, more self-reliant America makes for a more safe and more prosperous world.  

Between 2010 and 2019, the U.S. and Canada – one of our strongest allies – provided 91% of the world’s marginal increase in oil production.  We could do that again.  The U.S. is already the world’s largest producer of natural gas and could assist in meeting the needs of our allies in Europe as we have enormous amounts of recoverable resources.  And, we will discover and produce more, if allowed.  

The State of the Union is stressed.  Consumers every day notch in their memories the increasing costs they see at the pump, the grocery store, and their utility bills.  They see the shortages of goods in the ‘Land of Plenty’ and wonder what is going wrong?  They worry about their future, and the future for  their children.  They worry even more as they see the faces of Ukrainian children and their scared-to-death parents seeking refuge from an invasion from totalitarian Russia – fueled, in part, by the sale of oil to the United States.  

Last year oil imports from Russia increased 29%, even as you, President Biden, waged war on the U.S. energy industry, including your pipeline blockade on the border with our Canadian allies and friends who are our largest source of oil and our largest trading partner.  With all due respect, Mr. President, this madness must stop.  It is time to reconsider your Keystone decision. As partners with Canada, we can contribute to peace and stability in the world.  

Much has been said already on how a refocus on “renewable energy” might provide relief, and you will no doubt talk about that tonight.  It will not, Mr. President.  Europe has found this out the hard way. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine comes after an economically-crushing winter for Europe which has already engineered the deployment of renewable energy and whose consumers and industries are reeling from spiking energy input costs.  Instead of providing more jobs, this more expensive energy has cost jobs and is offshoring those jobs to China. 

There’s a little secret some of your aides may not be telling you, Mr. President.  If you are worried about the economic and national security consequences of energy policy, you should know that a “green energy future” is – at least currently – a Chinese energy future.  At the peak of U.S. dependence on foreign oil, we imported 23% from the Middle East.  Already the U.S. is 80% dependent upon China for its rare earth minerals and materials which make renewable energy work.  Your executive actions to date give us no assurances, in spite of what you say, that you intend to do anything meaningful with respect to sourcing these materials here at home.

At a time when the world is witnessing the horror of energy dependency and what it has wrought on the European continent, it is prudent to ask what the costs to the United States might be – and the kind of life we would leave for the generations to come – if we allow ourselves to become almost four times as dependent upon China for our renewable energy as we ever were on the Middle East for oil. 

In closing, we would remind you that the fascination with weak, intermittent, and renewable energies is not something new. You will recall that as a Freshman Senator from Delaware, you heard President Richard Nixon address it in his State of the Union Address on January 30, 1974.  In the five decades since, it has been repeated time and again. Yet, the only thing that has really and truly led us to energy security has been when Americans have been free to work our way out of the problem, as they did when we reached Energy Independence in 2020 under your immediate predecessor.  

We can do it again, with your help, Mr. President.  It will take courage on your part to go against the green-at-all-cost special interests that have captured your political party, but America will be better off for it.

 Tom Pyle, AEA President

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