There may be no metric Donald Trump is more obsessed with, and understands less about, than the price of oil. For its part, the oil industry has been unimpressed by the White House’s dramatic regulatory rollbacks and gifts of federal land, which haven’t managed to outweigh their hatred of Trump’s tariffs or his ironclad commitment to lower gas prices. (The general chaos emanating from Washington hasn’t helped win industry support, either.) The majority of U.S. oil is produced using costly extraction methods such as fracking, and drillers need relatively high oil prices to break even. This is a toxic combination: As oil has been getting cheaper, costs for essential inputs like steel have gone up. Broader uncertainty about the direction of the economy, partly fueled by tariffs, has made it difficult for companies to make longer-term planning decisions and court investors. Trump’s performative abolishment of protections for national monuments won’t fix any of these problems.
Even in more optimistic times, drilling on former monument sites was a tough sell. In 2017, Trump dismantled two national monuments in Utah: Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears. Oil and gas companies didn’t bite, and Biden restored the monuments’s status after taking office. That pitch hasn’t gotten any stronger under Trump 2.0. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s most recent quarterly energy survey, released in March, featured industry executives tearing into the administration they helped elect. “The rhetoric from the current administration is not helpful,” said one respondent. “If the oil price continues to drop, we will shut in production.”
I don’t like that the price has gone up, just a little bit, over the last few days. I was going to call and really start screaming at you. Are we OK? Nothing wrong? Right? [It’s] going to keep going down, right? Because we have inflation control.
Drillers in the United States are still probably a long way off from flooding into freshly “liberated” former national monument sites. Characteristically, the Trump administration has confused a symbolic attack on Joe Biden’s legacy for a material benefit to the fossil fuel industry. As of yet, the relatively dour fundamentals plaguing oil and gas drillers here haven’t changed. Prices are a bit higher, but steel is still expensive, and Donald Trump still doesn’t understand the oil industry.
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