Speaking at last week’s 9th annual SHALE INSIGHT™ conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump said, “We’ve ended the war on American energy, and we’ve ended the economic assault on our wonderful energy workers.”
The president is right. The costly war on energy that hurt America’s vital energy producers and cost American workers their jobs is finally over. Even Trump’s opponents would be hard pressed to say that they are not enjoying the energy windfall set in motion these past three years. This has been a result of the fulfillment of promises made by the president well before his election. Here is a sample of Trump’s record of promises made and promised kept in energy related fields:

• Except for residents of California, who travel a path radically different than the nation as a whole, we are all enjoying a renaissance at the gas pump. For years, watching the cost of a fill-up rise and rise had become a painful experience. Today, a widespread 30% reduction in that payment brings sighs of relief. As we discussed in “The End of Oil Shocks,” our October 3 article in America Out Loud, this is largely a result of a 40% increase in U.S. oil supplies in the past three years (3.65 million barrels per day rise since the end of 2016). 

• By rolling back the job killing regulations such as the Clean Power Plan, which nearly destroyed the coal industry, the nation has begun to reduce our dependence on foreign imports, especially those from unstable nations or those that may not have America’s best interests at heart. The Energy Information Administration reports that:

“In 1977…OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] nations were the source of 70% of total U.S. petroleum imports. … In 2018, OPEC’s share of total U.S. petroleum imports was about 29% [and] about 16% of U.S. petroleum imports came from Persian Gulf countries… Canada was the source of 15% of U.S. petroleum imports in 1994 and 43% in 2018 [Saudi Arabia now supplies only 9% of U.S. imports].”

• Trump has taking the U.S. out of the fraudulent, ineffective Paris Agreement on climate change intended to extort 3 trillion dollars from the American taxpayer. Complying with the Agreement would have put American jobs at risk for no meaningful impact on the Earth’s thermostat.

• The president has reopened federal land and offshore areas for energy exploration and production. He completed the effort to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) for exploration and development. It was held up for 40 years by lies about its environmental impact even though the oil reserves are located on barren tundra-like land.

• The United States is now the world leader in oil and natural gas production. Both reached record highs last year and are projected to break those records in 2019. We have seen increased exports of both coal (last year, coal exports reached their highest level in 5 years) and oil (which is now averaging a record 2.8 million barrels per day). The oil expansion has been significantly helped by the president’s ability to clear the way for previously embargoed projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline. He has also expedited the federal permitting process for other infrastructure projects.

Trump’s agenda is clearly resulting in a boom in energy production and manufacturing while keeping domestic energy prices low in most of the country. 

Sadly, there is little doubt that all the candidates attempting to unseat the present administration in 2020, if successful, will quickly attempt to undo the aforementioned efforts to open our energy floodgates.

For the time being, however, we have at least another year to enjoy Trump’s agenda which promises America’s energy dominance, unleashing our potential by revitalizing local economies that provide thousands of new jobs and improving the quality of life for all Americans.
Trump concluded at the conference “I promised that, as president, I’d unleash American energy like never before, because our natural resources do not belong to government, they belong to the people of this country. “
It is a welcome change from politics as usual that the president continues to do precisely what he says he is doing. His complete speech at the shale conference may be read here.