ConservAmerica President Jeff Kupfer spoke this week with Washington Examiner Breanne Deppisch about the Russian sanctions and the global supply crunch that is squeezing consumers with oil prices of well over $100 a barrel.
Biden oil ban adds uncertainty for US oil and gas companies
President Joe Biden’s decision to ban all Russian oil imports has forced his administration to shift its posture toward domestic energy almost entirely in a matter of days, with the White House urging oil and gas companies to ramp up production after months of discouraging investments in fossil fuels and attempting to pass anti-drilling regulations. Industry executives and analysts alike say that while they share the administration’s goal of boosting domestic supply, they see these remarks as incongruent with the administration’s earlier stance, which prioritized climate change-fighting measures and sought to limit the expansion of drilling.
“If the message [from the Biden administration] for the last year has been, ‘There’s no future for you in producing, we’re not going to make it easy for you either to produce or to get product to market,’ then companies are going to react to that narrative … and they’re going to make their decisions” accordingly, said Jeff Kupfer, formerly the acting deputy director of the Department of Energy under President George W. Bush.
Just because prices are up right now “doesn’t mean that companies are going to turn on a dime and all of a sudden make a decision to try to produce,” he added.
Even if companies do move to scale up production, “that doesn’t [let] the administration off the hook, in terms of its policies over the last year,” said Kupfer. “The message that they’ve sent to the oil and gas industry about whether they should be investing in additional resources and spending the necessary capital to be able to produce.”
Read the full story at The Washington Examiner.