Oh Noez!! 'Murca!! Freedumb!! Biden Proposes Raising Fees, Bonds To Drill Oil/Gas On Public Lands
Oil and gas drillers would have to commit more than 10 times as much money to guarantee their wells won’t pollute under an Interior Department proposal announced Thursday, the first such update to the program in more than a half-century. The Bureau of Land Management outlined widespread changes to what oil and gas companies would pay to operate on federal lands, including raising royalty rates and several minimum fees. The biggest change would raise their bonding requirement for the first time since 1960, to $150,000 per lease from $10,000, to help pay to plug wells or secure leaky ones if firms go out of business or abandon their wells.
“We don’t want the taxpayers holding the bag in the future,” Laura Daniel-Davis, Interior principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, said in a phone interview. The minimum royalty rate the government is paid from oil and gas production on federal lands would rise for the first time in a century, to 16.67 percent from 12.5 percent. And the agency would raise minimum fees for what companies pay to lease and hold lands, to try to limit speculation on leases that companies can hold for up to a decade without drilling, Daniel-Davis said.
The proposed rules mark the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort yet to overhaul the rules for oil and gas leasing on public lands, the culmination of two years of work aimed at reconciling fossil fuel extraction with the president’s climate agenda. Administration officials have accused oil and gas companies of hoarding federal land without drilling, saying that is bad for consumer energy prices, and say they are trying to fix an antiquated rule book that shortchanges taxpayers. Daniel-Davis said the administration wants to reduce incentives for “speculators — less responsible actors that have been out on the landscape.”
The increases in the proposal are substantial, and will make it harder for smaller oil and gas producers to lease and drill on public land, said Dan Naatz, executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. It takes a lot of land and millions of dollars of investment to put together a drilling program, and companies need to be able to cobble that land together over time, he added.
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/20/biden-wants-make-oil-companies-pay-much-more-drill-federal-lands/
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All of it, I hope.
