American Petroleum Institute’s (API) Dustin Meyer detailed to Breitbart News in an interview how the Big Beautiful Bill would mark a “new era” of American energy dominance.
Meyer, API’s senior vice president of policy, economics, and regulatory affairs, spoke to Breitbart News as the Senate passed the Big Beautiful Bill, which API applauded in a statement on Tuesday.
The institute’s senior vice president explained to Breitbart News how the Big Beautiful Bill would massively expand oil and natural gas production.
Meyer said that the Big Beautiful Bill “mark[s] a new era of resource development on federal lands and waters here in the US. It’s a pretty sharp departure from how things have been done in the past,” referring to the anti-energy-development regime of the Biden administration.
The Big Beautiful Bill, if passed into law, would require:
- The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to hold quarterly lease sales
- Mandatory offshore oil and gas lease sales
- Oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refugee and National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) and split revenue with the state
Mike Sommers, the president and CEO of API, noted at a policy event with Breitbart News in June that there were only two lease sales in the Gulf of America during the Biden administration, and that was only at the behest of then-Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) during the crafting of the Inflation Reduction Act.
In contrast, Meyer said that the Big Beautiful Bill now requires “administrations of either party to do two lease sales per year in the Gulf of America for the next 15 years. Onshore, they have to hold quarterly lease sales on federal lands for acreage that is actually nominated by potential bidders.”
He continued, “This also opens up Alaska by requiring at least five lease sales over the next ten years in the National Petroleum Reserve, and four in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, right? As well as six additional ones in the Cook Inlet, which is in southern part of Alaska.”
“Taken together, this gives the industry not just the certainty that these areas will be open for development, but certainty over the specific number of lease sales that will be held, and it hopefully will prevent us falling back into the situation that we found ourselves in over the last four years, in which the Biden administration did everything they could to stymie opportunities for development on these lands and waters, including by refusing to hold lease sales.”
Meyer noted that the bill essentially restarts offshore oil and gas lease sales after the energy development stagnation under the Biden administration.
“Last year was the first year since 1966 in which the United States did not have an offshore oil and gas lease sale. And, if it weren’t for this legislation, there’s a good chance that next year we wouldn’t have any lease sales either. So it really will have a tangible, measurable impact in terms of ensuring that these lease sales actually happen.”
Trump has long pushed for domestic energy production under the banner of “energy dominance.” During his first term in office, the United States became a net exporter oil for the first time in 70 years. The Department of the Interior has noted that offshore energy production could surpass 2 million barrels of oil per day by 2025-2026, setting a potential all-time record.
He noted that, in the Gulf of America, the existing industry helps sustain over 375,000 jobs.
“That’s a reminder that the federal lands and waters, they’re already a sizable chunk of the massive U.S. oil and gas production base. So federal lands and waters are responsible for about 25 percent of U.S. oil production and 12% of U.S. gas production. And, remember, we’re by far the world’s largest oil producer and we’re by far the world’s largest natural gas producer. So, that’s a reminder of the magnitude of these resources in the production base right now, but we just want to make sure that that continues for years — hopefully decades — to come,” he remarked.
Meyer also noted that it would not only lead to developing more jobs, but also help pay off the debt and support conservation. He said that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revenue from the lease sales would pay $20 billion over ten years and $900 million would go to the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
He remarked, “We’re the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and you think about all of the benefits that go along with that, both domestic here in terms of the job creation and the economics and the GDP impacts, to say nothing of the geopolitical situation and the leverage that that gives us out there.”
“We’re in a much stronger position today than what we were, say, in 2005 in which we were the world’s largest importer of oil and gas, dependent on foreign supplies of energy, and we really didn’t control our own destiny,” Meyer concluded. “We’re in a much stronger place now. Policies like this, on the leasing front, on the access front, smartly recognized the importance of ensuring that come 2030 or 2035 that we retain that leverage, that we’ve retained that strength, and we don’t fall back into the position of dependence that we were in in 2005 and the generations that led up to that. So that’s why this is really smart policy making.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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