Reuters reports White House officials reached out to energy companies as the world faces record high prices and a crisis of shortage in supplies. One week earlier, the president boasted during a White House event on national monuments he had suspended oil and gas drilling on federal lands in Alaska.
“Alaska is pretty big. There’s an awful lot we need to protect,” Biden declared Friday. “That’s why I’m refusing to sell out the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas drilling.” In June, President Biden suspended oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after President Donald Trump opened the area up to drilling in 2017.
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Biden also halted new oil and gas leasing and drilling permits on federal lands in January.
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The latest outreach to the oil industry is an awkward shift for the Biden administration, which has pledged to move the country away from fossil fuels and has drawn criticism from the industry and Republicans for pausing lease sales of federal land for oil and gas development
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The price of U.S. crude oil hit a whooping $80 a barrel this month, a seven-year high. This year oil production remains about two million barrels a day lower than the nearly 13 million barrels per day produced by the United States in 2019, prior to the pandemic.
The United States government announced Wednesday that households could see heating bills jump as much as 54 percent.
Nearly half of U.S. households that warm their homes with natural gas can expect to spend an average of 30% more on their bills than last year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
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The agency said that bills would be 50% higher if the winter is 10% colder than average and 22% higher if the winter is 10% warmer than average.
Much of the rise in energy costs is beyond the White House’s control and has been attributed to rebounding demand as the economy snaps back from the pandemic as well as an uptick in China's energy consumption, market analysts said. U.S. oil production has also slipped compared to record output before the pandemic, and oil companies that were hit hard by the plunging demand then have been slow to drill new wells. The OPEC oil cartel is also being careful about opening its spigots too loosely after oil prices tumbled during the pandemic.
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Last week, the White House blamed September’s Hurricane Ida for the spike in energy costs in the fall, but said that the president’s priority was to shift to cleaner sources of energy.
“Certainly, we all want to keep gasoline prices low, but the threat of the crisis — the climate crisis — certainly can’t wait any longer,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said to reporters.
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