The Biden Administration Has Been Very Good for Big Oil | The New Republic – February 2023

Source: The Biden Administration Has Been Very Good for Big Oil | The New Republic

Four of the country’s biggest oil companies—Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, and Shell—reported record profits last year. Shell made $40 billion—double what it had the year prior. Payouts to shareholders across the industry increased by 76 percent over the previous year, stretching up to $200 billion. And the gifts keep on coming.

This week, the Biden administration moved toward approving an $8 billion ConocoPhillips project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, located in Alaska’s North Slope. The company’sWillow project is expected to produce some 600 million barrels over the next 30 years in one of the fastest-warming parts of the planet. Critics argue the project threatens already endangered Indigenous livelihoods there. The Bureau of Land Management, meanwhile, issued its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, recommending the company drill three wells instead of the five it initially proposed. The Department of Interior, which noted it still has “substantial concerns” about the project’s climate and environmental impacts, will have 30 days to decide its fate. “That decision may select a different alternative, including no action, or the deferral of additional drill pads beyond the single deferral described under the preferred alternative,” the department wrote in a press statement about the BLM recommendation.

ConocoPhillips, for its part, seems confident. Reporting profits that doubled to $18.7 billion in 2022, chairman and CEO Ryan Lance told analysts on Thursday that the company is “moving forward with our little project up in Alaska.” Seeming to take a jab at critics, including in the White House, Lance added that “this is what the administration has asked us for: U.S. production that’s low GHG emission production. This is exactly what the administration has asked us to do as an industry, and that’s what we are trying to do as a company.” Over the next 30 years, Willow is expected to produce carbon emissions equivalent to what a third of America’s coal-fired power plants produce in a year. ConocoPhillips also hopes for Willow to be an anchor for a larger expansion in the Western Arctic to develop three billion barrels of oil. If burned, those barrels would belch out emissions equivalent to what the entire U.S. transportation sector produces in a year.