Consider: 800,000 BOPe/day not coming down the Keystone XL pipeline. (ALL on Biden, day one, he stopped it.)
Lockdowns causing plummeting demand crashing oil prices led to negative prices per barrel during COVID. Trump moved to permit storage of oil in the SPR, which ended the negative pricing (as contracts coming due would have a place to be delivered), for a cut of the oil to go to the SPR. (Actually, a brilliant win/win deal, a businessman's solution.
That was nixed by the Democrats, The result was that production had to be cut.
The other result was that stripper wells, producing under 20 bbls of oil per day each, but accounting for over 1.5 million barrels of oil per day in aggregate, became an economic liability for their operators, and were plugged and abandoned. That production was lost, and will not likely be put back on line, ever. The projected ROI is either negative or jut too low.
When demand increased post COVID, prices went up because the production per day across the US had suffered a 'hit' from that P&A'd stripper production that could have been largely mitigated by imported Canadian oil from the Keystone XL.
As a political gesture to increase global supply and thus reduce oil prices and pump prices for gasoline, Biden ordered the sale of oil from our SPR to even the Chinese, bringing global crude prices down, and further deterring drilling for new oil reservoirs by not leasing Federal Lands, onshore and off, even as required by law.
Increased other obstacles to development of existing fields appeared in the form of objections to developing takeaway capacity, particularly involving pipelines.--Oil isn't worth anything until it can be transported to buyers, and the more that costs, the less the profits for the oil companies. ($5.00 per barrel increase in cost from pipeline to rail transport, and even more if it has to be trucked.) There is little point in developing reserves if the ROI is uncertain and badly delayed.
Combine that with ESG in the Banking/Venture Capital Industry, and the absence of development capital makes it even more difficult to invest in possible future returns. Wells will only be drilled where the oil can go to market, and where the ROI is best, because the drilling is increasingly done with the profits from existing production.
This administration has constructed the problem, meticulously prevented solutions by the industry, and will inevitably blame the industry for the mess it has created, perhaps even citing that blame as the reason it should be permitted to take over energy production at the Federal Level ("nationalize" energy production).
I'm on the verge of retirement, anyway, and while walking out in the event of a Government takeover would mean little except as a gesture, as patriotic as American oil workers are, I would think the best of the best would resist becoming government employees under these circumstances. I know I would.
