Joe Biden’s pause on oil and gas development on public lands splits conservationists, industry – By Jason Blevins (Colorado Sun) / January 25 2021
Conservationists say suspending leasing and drilling offers a chance to overhaul an antiquated natural resources management system. Energy producers predict billions in losses for Western communities.
Conservationists are cheering the Biden administration’s 60-day pause on new energy development on public lands as a chance to overhaul an antiquated leasing program that has not been modified in decades. Oil and gas producers are not happy and they are warning of severe economic shocks from the decision announced Thursday.
“Bowing to the environmental left to fulfill a campaign promise and to prove his crew with climate change activists has real consequences for Westerners,” said Kathleen Sgamma with the Western Energy Alliance. “This is a sacrifice of real people’s livelihoods and it does nothing for climate change. If we don’t produce oil and natural gas in the West it gets produced somewhere else and if it comes from overseas, it has even more climate change impact.”
Oil and gas harvested from federal lands account for about a quarter of all U.S. annual production but it pays a lot of bills.
The Bureau of Land Management has about 26.3 million acres under lease to oil and gas producers right now, including 2.5 million acres in Colorado.
More than $8 billion in oil and gas royalty revenue — set at a rate of 12.5% in the 1920 Mineral Leasing Act — as well as fees from other natural resources were distributed in fiscal 2020 to states and counties, the Reclamation Fund and the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury then distributed $524 million to the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That conservation fund has received more than $20 billion in the last 50 years and last year’s Great American Outdoors Act directed $900 million on oil and gas royalties into the fund every year.
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