The House Natural Resources Committee, led by Chairman Doc Hastings, will hold a series of oversight hearings regarding public lands drilling policy in the coming days:
- Department of Interior FY12 budget (3/3/11)
- U.S. Bureau of Land Management FY12 budget (3/8/11)
Rhetoric versus reality
“Millions of acres of multi-use land in the West are at risk of being locked-up if the Administration carries out this [wild lands] policy.” – Doc Hastings, 22 February 2011
Republican Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings and his colleagues have been arguing relentlessly that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s energy policies will cripple domestic production. They claim that oil and gas corporations need access to additional Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in order to hedge against oil production concerns in the Middle East and keep down the price at the pump. But the facts simply do not support these claims.
Oil and gas industry land grab
What Hastings fails to mention is that oil and gas companies are involved in a huge land grab and have locked up over nearly 30 million (29.875 million) acres of public lands in the Intermountain West administered by the BLM. In fact, for every 1 acre of BLM protected wilderness land in western states, 42 acres are leased for drilling.
This industry land grab appears to be highly speculative. In fact, the oil and gas industry has not developed 64 percent of BLM lands already leased for drilling. Access to public lands is simply not an issue.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Land Management
Facts on domestic oil and natural gas production
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States is the world’s third largest producer of oil in the world as of 2009, producing 9.14 million barrels of oil per day. The United States is also the world’s largest producer of natural gas, and domestic production of natural gas at well sites is up nearly 11 percent from 2005 to 2009.
Matthew Garrington, Deputy Director, Checks and Balances Project:
“The oil and gas industry should stop whining just because our public lands won’t be their personal ATM machine. Oil and gas companies need to explain why they have locked-up nearly 30 million acres of our western public lands for drilling and are asking for more, even though they are sitting on 20 million acres of those lands. We need an honest conversation about our energy policy. If Doc Hastings is concerned with domestic energy production, he should get to the bottom of industry’s speculative land grab.”
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