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Fracking
By Trevor Brown, Oklahoma Watch
President Donald Trump offered a warning to Oklahoma and other energy-rich states during the final months of his unsuccessful re-election bid.
The president cautioned that if Joe Biden won, the new Democratic president would quickly take action on an aggressive climate-change agenda, specifically by banning fracking across the country, a move he said would eliminate thousands of oil and gas jobs.
“Well, that means Texas is going to be one of the most unemployed states in our country,” the president said during a news conference in July. “That means Oklahoma, North Dakota, New Mexico are going to be a disaster.”
Biden’s actual written energy plan, however, previews a much different agenda.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, which have been rated as false by several fact-checkers, Biden does not plan a wholesale ban on old or new fracking. His climate strategy includes a proposal to only cease approving new oil and gas permits on federal lands.
In Oklahoma, where less than 2% of the land is owned by the federal government, the impact of fulfilling campaign promise would be far from the dire scenarios Trump suggested for the state’s oil and gas industry.
Energy leaders and environmental activists say that although they see a Biden administration looking much different from its predecessor, they do not see a widespread ban on fracking anytime soon.
Instead, experts are planning for a return — and in some cases, an expansion — of the Obama-era energy and climate strategy Trump has largely dismantled.
Brook Simmons, president of the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma, said rather than fearing a fracking ban, he is more concerned about a suite of packages that Biden could adopt.
“If Biden chooses to ban permits for drilling on federal lands, he even probably has some challenges ahead of him in doing that,” Simmons said. “But he can still inflict pain on the industry through things like delays and just death by a thousand cuts by slowing the industry’s plans for development or investment.”