‘Drill baby, drill’? Not So Fast

“Drill, baby, drill” was revived as a catchy campaign slogan for Donald Trump, but it may not be a realistic plan in the wake of Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, experts say.

They predict the biggest obstacle Trump will face in his widely publicized plans to expand oil and gas production, including fracking, is not the opposition of Democrats or environmentalists, but simple supply-and-demand economics.

Oil and gas prices in the U.S. are already relatively low as production hit record levels under the Biden Administration. Domestic natural gas production has risen to over 96 cubic feet per day — enough to fill one million Olympic-sized swimming pools — and Texas produces more than any other state, 24.6% of this total as of 2022.

Prices are projected to fall further over the next five years, barring any major changes in ongoing geopolitical conflicts. Because of this, companies are unlikely to increase production unless there’s a big increase in demand, according to Carolyn Kissane, associate dean of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.

“In some ways, I think the ‘drill, baby, drill,’ is old,” Kissane says. “It’s already happened or happening, and so the next administration comes in confronting a market that doesn’t necessarily need more supply.”

Another obstacle is the lack of cohesion between Trump’s plans for the energy sector and his broader economic plans. Trump recently announced he would levy strict tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico as early as his first day in office (a move supported by Senator Ted Cruz) but sparking concern among local economists.

This move also rattled leaders of the energy industry, including Chet Thompson, chief executive of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry association that represents companies such as ExxonMobil and Valero Energy.

“American refiners depend on crude oil from Canada and Mexico to produce the affordable, reliable fuels consumers count on every day,” Thompson wrote in a statement released Nov. 27. “Therefore, we would hope any future tariffs would exclude these critical feedstocks and refined products.”

Beyond economic concerns, companies also have to contend with the social consequences of drilling where community members are against fossil fuel extraction — like public lands used for recreation or wildlife conservation.

“You have the Arctic wildlife reserve that Trump threatens to open. Honestly, most [oil and gas] companies won’t go there,” NYU’s Kissane says. “There’s too much reputational harm. … He may threaten to open it up, but companies are not going to go there.” 

Even so, the incoming administration has given every indication that it is serious about trying to expand fracking and other oil and gas exploration in every way possible, including on public lands.

As Energy Secretary, Trump chose Chris Wright, a long-time energy executive who supports increasing fossil fuel production. Wright has no experience working in government, but his selection reflects the tight connections the incoming administration hopes to foster between fossil fuel companies and the government.

“What Trump has done is he’s pulled the curtain back and said explicitly that there is a relationship between the political machinations in Washington and Big Energy, Big Oil and Gas,” explains Ted Auch, a program director at Fractracker Alliance, a nonprofit that does data visualization work related to the environmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction.

Trump chose North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as both Secretary of the Interior — the official in charge of managing federal lands — and head of a new National Energy Council. The goal here is to streamline development of fossil fuels and other domestic energy, according to Hannah Wiseman, an energy law professor at Penn State University. 

“Other presidents have done this, including President Biden,” Wiseman says. “We need many agencies with jurisdiction over different parts of energy to coordinate better.”

These cabinet selections are more “serious guys” than Trump’s picks when he was first elected president in 2016, according to Auch. “They were just fumbling around in the dark their first 90 days during the first [Trump] administration, and they still got a lot done,” he says.

Anticipating a friendlier administration, the Independent Petroleum Association of American and the American Petroleum Institute have both released memos aimed at the Trump transition team, outlining policies they hope to see under the new administration — such as tax cuts for the energy sector, removal of the Biden administration’s methane emissions charge, reopening of leasing to drill on public lands, and permission to export US-produced natural gas.

Still, some industry officials are hoping for more consistency in regulation between the current and future administrations. “One of the challenges with this polarized political environment we find ourselves in is the impact of policy switching back and forth as political cycles occur and elections happen and administrations change,” Exxon Mobil chief executive Darren Woods told Politico. “That’s not good for the economy.” 

In some ways, though, the transition from Biden to Trump may not be nearly as drastic for energy policy as the campaign’s rhetoric might have suggested. While Biden has steered hundreds of billions of federal dollars to green energy sources like solar and wind, a policy Trump opposes, Biden has also quietly presided over a record expansion in domestic oil and gas drilling, including many wells that utilize the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

In fact, the US has actually fracked more wells in the last four years than in the previous 40 years, Kissane says.

“The Republicans just say the quiet part out loud,” agrees Auch. “I don’t really feel like any community, a fracking community or environmental justice community, really wants to get into the foxhole with the Democrats either.” 

Fracking was an especially intense campaign issue because of the electoral importance of Pennsylvania, a highly contested battleground state. Natural gas, which is predominantly extracted from fracked wells, has been the dominant source of electric power in most US states for years, and Pennsylvania is the country’s second largest producer, after Texas.

Natural gas is frequently touted by the petroleum industry as a “transition fuel” between fossil fuels and renewable energy options. However, because it is a fossil fuel with a complicated extraction process, it comes with its own environmental risks.

Many new wells are drilled into shale, a formation made up of tightly packed sedimentary rock. Because shale is so tightly packed, oil and gas do not just bubble up to the surface when drilled. This unconventional rock requires an unconventional well to be drilled into it — this is where fracking comes in, according to Wiseman.

The process for creating these wells involves drilling thousands of feet into the ground. The drilled well is then lined with concrete and a steel pipe with lots of little holes for oil and gas to flow into. Once the well is lined, oil and gas companies inject water, sand, and chemicals into the well at a very high pressure, cracking the rocks around the well and releasing the oil and gas from within the rock formation. This final step, the injection of water, sand, and chemicals, is the part of the process known as fracking. 

Fracking effectively extracts oil and gas from difficult to reach areas, but the process comes with environmental costs that have elevated it to a position of controversy.

“The greatest concern, of course, is the fact that fracking for oil and gas means that we have more oil and gas,” Wiseman says. “People are burning it, and that’s contributing to climate change.”

But there are direct environmental risks as well, including the risk of inhaling airborne volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that emerge from fracked wells. “You can sometimes even see a little shimmery haze in the air” near wells, Wiseman says. Among these VOCs is methane itself, also called natural gas, a powerful greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere even more effectively than carbon dioxide.

Additionally, brine and fossil fuels leaking at drill sites and from abandoned wells contribute to the pollution. The Railroad Commission of Texas administers a program that has plugged thousands of abandoned wells in the state, but there is a backlog of wells waiting to be plugged — 476,790 as of last year, Environmental Health News reported.

Even in states like Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan — where fracking does not directly impact the landscape — there are indirect environmental impacts, like sand shortages and increased wastewater from removing sand and sending it to states where it is used for fracking.

Donald Trump won Texas by 1,558,347 votes this year, a margin of 13.6% over Kamala Harris, and over one third of state voters said they thought the economy was the election’s most important issue, according to a CNN exit poll.

Even so, fracking opponents are hopeful that Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda will prove unpopular once voters understand that it may not lower gas prices or improve their quality of life — something that many who live in heavily-fracked states already know well.

“Living in the state that is the second biggest natural gas producer has not benefited us here,” says Karen Feridun, a grassroots environmental advocate in Pennsylvania and founder of the anti-fracking group Berks Gas Truth. “People aren’t getting really, really cheap gas, but they’re also not getting great jobs,” she says. “The economics of it are not really shaking out.”