President Joe Biden’s war on the oil and gas industry has cost the United States more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in lost economic activity, according to a new study.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity released the findings of its study to The Daily Wire after U.S. oil production under Biden has failed to reach the same trend line regarding rate of growth that was achieved under former President Donald Trump.
While the U.S. is currently producing more oil than ever before, it is only slightly higher than the U.S. was producing in 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
The study was conducted by Stephen Moore, Co-Founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and Former Chief Economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Casey Mulligan, Ph.D., Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Senior Fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
“The Energy Information Agency had predicted that the U.S. could produce as much as 15 million barrels of oil under current trends,” the study found. “According to EIA, in the second half of 2023, U.S. daily oil production averaged 13.2 million barrels, which is close to the peak reached under Trump.”
The study found that the average price of a barrel of oil has been significantly higher under Biden, $72 per barrel, than it was under Trump, $54 per barrel.
The productivity generated from each new well surged under Trump by 23%, but “fell significantly” once Biden took office in January 2021 through late last year “both in absolute terms and relative to previous trends.”
The decline in the rate of production reflects “rising extraction costs, which is one of the consequences of increased regulation, tax hikes, and investor unwillingness to fund petroleum companies,” the study said.
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“Although the EIA lowered its forecasts in early 2021 due to new challenges oil companies faced in securing capital, the agency still anticipated productivity growth to return,” the study said. “According to their modest forecast, U.S. production should have already reached 14 MMb/d [million barrels per day] by 2022. But, in fact, production had yet to reach 13.0 MMb/d even by mid 2023. The surprisingly low production results are part of the reason why EIA cut its production forecasts in 2022 and, especially, 2023.”
Had the rate of production under Biden remained the same as under Trump, the U.S. would have produced at least an additional 2.4 billion barrels. The lost oil and gas production and increased extraction costs have reduced “cumulative GDP by about $250 billion.”
“Anti-energy policies in the United States enrich the major oil producers in Asia and the Middle East, some of whom use their wealth to fund terrorism,” the study said. “Indeed, they are enriched twice by our policies. One benefit they get is that subtractions from U.S. production are subtractions from world production that contribute to higher world oil prices. The second benefit is that undermining shale activity in the U.S. gives OPEC more pricing power, because we are no longer as able to respond to OPEC production cuts with production increases of our own. Indirectly, Biden’s policies regarding U.S. production are reducing OPEC production too.”
Moore said that the report made it clear that Biden’s policies were wounding U.S. national security, the economy, and global stability.
“This report makes it clear that the left’s radical agenda, led by Biden’s policies, are self-inflicted wounds that are directly contributing to the current economic challenges and rising energy costs hurting millions of working Americans across the country,” he said.