Energy industry swipes back at Psaki 'red herring' comment on oil and gas leases
Energy industry representatives said the reason so many drilling permits sit unused is more complicated than White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki suggested.
"This represents a fundamental misunderstanding as to how this process works," American Petroleum Institute (API) president and CEO Mike Sommers told FOX Business when asked about Psaki's comments. "Once you lease land there is a whole process that you have to go through. First you have to actually discover whether actually there is oil and gas in that land. Second of all, you have to get a permit to actually develop that land."
Sommers added: "Right now we actually are developing more leases than we have in two decades so the White House certainly doesn't have their facts straight on this."
Energy Workforce and Technology Council CEO Leslie Beyer similarly said "some permits are viable and some are not," as a reason for why many are sitting unused. The federal leasing moratorium also isn't helpful in the current energy environment, she said.
"The moratorium on leasing certainly adds an additional… block to American energy production, so that is the opposite of what we need to be doing right now," she said. "We need to stop the rhetoric that's anti-fossil fuel and we need some clarity just in the regulatory sense that this administration is behind domestic energy production."
Of course, Biden’s shiite show of a energy policy is somehow Trump’s fault.
