Gov. Cox urges President Biden to eliminate barriers to increasing U.S. domestic oil and gas production

SALT LAKE CITY (March 7, 2022) — Gov. Spencer Cox sent a letter to President Joe Biden today encouraging him to eliminate any barriers to increasing U.S. domestic oil and gas production. Read the letter in its entirety below.

Dear Mr. President, 

I appreciate many of the actions you’ve taken over the past two weeks to isolate Russia and provide support to Ukraine, and I encourage you to consider additional measures, including eliminating any barriers to increasing U.S. domestic oil and gas production. This request won’t surprise you. I have consistently urged your administration, including long before this current crisis, to end your battle against developing American energy on public lands. It is more important now than ever that the United States and our allies produce the resources that will allow the world to move away from dependence on Russia and other authoritarian regimes. 

As a Western public lands state, we certainly have an interest in seeing these resources developed, but this is about far more than benefiting Western communities. It is strikingly inconsistent for U.S. policy to discourage European reliance on Russian-produced energy while simultaneously refusing the leasing and permitting of oil and gas development on our own federal lands. Your Department of Interior’s anti-energy policies are not merely economically destructive and environmentally wrongheaded, but, as should now be very clear, they have serious geopolitical implications. 

Europe’s energy dependence on Russia is central to the long string of diplomatic failures that have empowered Vladimir Putin to threaten European stability. Putin will continue to use this dependency to his advantage so long as he holds European countries as ‘energy hostages’. In this setting, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve appears patronizing unless we’re willing to do everything possible to develop additional American energy. 

America’s tremendous energy wealth, including the vast oil and gas reserves beneath Western states’ public lands, could provide the fuel our European allies need to break away from Russian energy dominance. Increased oil and gas exports to European nations would allow our allies to lower their surging energy costs, improve the reliability of their renewable-focused electrical grids, and shut off the Russian pipelines currently enriching the Putin regime. Russia, without a captive market for its energy exports, would surely have less political capacity with which to threaten its neighbors and fewer economic resources for military expansion. 

Again, to achieve America’s potential as an energy exporter able to dramatically increase global supply and offer options to our European allies, your administration must end its fight against public land energy development in Western states, including Utah. We need renewed oil and gas leasing on our public lands. We need support for the Uinta Basin Railway, which would increase Utah’s oil exports to refineries on the Gulf Coast to support both domestic and European markets. We need the federal government to refrain from using overly restrictive, landscape scale designations that often lock up Utah’s energy wealth. And we need the federal government to improve regulatory processes and reduce red tape to allow for the timely development of Utah’s resources by private industry. During the previous administration, the Bureau of Land Management issued an average of 115 leases a year for oil and gas development in Utah. Even the Obama Administration issued an average of 81 each year. Since you took office, the Bureau of Land Management has not conducted a single oil and gas lease sale in Utah and has now canceled the small lease sale originally planned for later this month. It is high time for your administration to support, rather than suppress, reliable energy production on public lands. 

What’s more, for those who truly care about the environment and climate change, substituting American gas and oil for Russian gas and oil at home and abroad will make a significant impact on global carbon emissions. Your own Secretary of Energy has stated that Russian natural gas is “the dirtiest form of natural gas on earth.” That assertion is backed up by a 2019 study by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory, which shows that liquified natural gas shipped from the U.S. to Europe would generate less greenhouse gas emissions than natural gas imported from Russia. 

The transition to a low-carbon, green global economy will take time. Meanwhile, the world and European countries will continue to rely on oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels while this transition occurs. So long as oil and gas extraction continues to occur around the globe, the United States must play a role as we produce oil and gas with far less environmental impacts than our energy competitors in Russia, Venezuela, and the Middle East. If America embraces its potential as an energy superpower, democracies around the world will benefit by doing business with a fellow democracy rather than struggling under the thumb of energy-rich authoritarian regimes. 

A similar dynamic exists with the extraction of critical minerals and rare earth elements essential to the production of batteries and other clean-energy technologies. Currently, China holds a near-monopoly on both the extraction and processing of many critical minerals, despite the vast potential for critical minerals beneath America’s public lands. Expansion of domestic mining and processing capacity would free America from Chinese dominance over critical minerals and speed the adoption of green technologies, including electric vehicles. Again, if the federal government wants to attain a green energy revolution it must step up its efforts to streamline permitting, guarantee access, and reduce regulatory barriers in order to facilitate critical mineral exploration and development. Your administration seemed to recognize this recently by announcing new initiatives around our critical minerals supply chain, but on the same day the Department of Interior renewed its litigation against a major Alaska mining project, making me skeptical about the administration’s sincerity and commitment to critical mineral exploration. 

In conversations with your cabinet, we have appreciated hearing Secretary Granholm’s enthusiasm for pursuing critical minerals, but this effort will fail without a more coherent policy across both the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior, where regulatory authority resides. Your administration needs to begin saying yes to leasing and permitting, even if it upsets environmental interest groups that will always find a reason to say no. 

Ramping up our leasing, permitting, and development of energy and critical minerals on federal lands won’t happen overnight, but to paraphrase the old adage, the best time to develop American resources was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. We must stop falling prey to the false choices presented by extreme interest groups. To meet your own climate goals and improve the environment globally, we must take advantage of the natural resources found right here at home. 

As it has throughout its history, America finds itself in the difficult position as the leader of free nations beset by challenges from expansionist authoritarian dictatorships. Just as America’s support to the United Kingdom through the Lend-Lease Program in World War II was critical to British survival from the Nazi onslaught prior to America’s formal entry into War, we likely find ourselves in a situation where American energy is needed for Europeans to protect themselves from Russian aggression. The energy and mineral wealth of the Western United States is a great place to start providing our allies with the resources they need. 

Sincerely, 
Spencer J. Cox 
Governor 

Download a copy of the letter here.

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