Daily Archives: 25 July 2023

BLM and Fairness to the Taxpayer

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The Bureau of Land Management is moving finalize its two-yr-old effort to increase the minimum price oil and gas developers must pay to lease Federal land for oil and gas development by five times: from $2 per acre to $10 per acre. BLM also wants to increase the minimum bond those developers must pay from $10,000 to $150,000.

Those increases, on their faces, look like chump change, but those minima are for miniscule fields that are far too small even to think about drilling an exploratory well. Also included in the BLM’s move are these cost increases and production limitations:

  • reduce the primary term for new onshore leases from 10 years to five years, even though a significant percentage of leases require more than five years to start producing. For example, recent data shows that 37% of leases in New Mexico started production more than five years after authorization.
  • raise annual rental rates to $3/acre for the first two years, and then $5/acre, increasing costs by at least $123 million per year.
  • eliminate authority to grant royalty relief in difficult times or national emergency.
  • raise the minimum inspection fees each operator will pay annually to anywhere from $800-$11,300 per lease, varying by lease.

And this:

  • impose a new $10,000/mile annual fee for water depths greater than 500 feet; and $1,000/mile for water depths less than 500 feet. There are approximately 26,000 miles of pipelines in the offshore with about 12,600 miles in waters less than 400 feet and 13,700 miles in waters greater than 400 feet. Increased annual costs would total about $149 million.

The BLM claims that these increases aim[] to ensure fairness to the taxpayer.

That’s silly.

What would be fair to us taxpayers, and especially to those of us ordinary Americans on the bottom rungs of our economy who pay little or no taxes, would be to not do those increases—none of us will see a cent of those cost increases. We will, though, pay even more for our energy—home heating and cooling, fuel for our cars and for the shippers’ trucks. No, the money from those increases will go to the Biden administration’s special interests.

Not Successful?

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The Wall Street Journal thinks so regarding Texas border security. Here’s their headline and subheadline from last Friday:

Texas Spent Billions on Border Security. It’s Not Working.
Operation Lone Star, with $4.5 billion spent so far, has had little effect on migration while facing charges of civil-rights abuses

And this, in Findell’s third paragraph:

The program is an explicit challenge to the national government, which by law controls international borders and immigration enforcement.

The rest of her piece follows closely on her headline while largely ignoring that key datum in her third paragraph.

On the other hand, there are some actual facts regarding Texas’ Operation Lone Star:

Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to over 394,200 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 31,300 criminal arrests, with more than 29,100 felony charges reported. In the fight against fentanyl, Texas law enforcement has seized over 422 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.

That sounds pretty successful to this poor, dumb Texan. That’s also despite the national government’s—President Joe Biden’s (D) administration’s—conscious decision to not control our southern border, to instead allow record millions of illegal aliens to flood across that border.

The idea that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) administration faces civil-rights charges is literally, narrowly true. The cases brought, though, are risible. There’s nothing at all abusive about transporting illegal aliens—who volunteer for the trip—to loudly avowedly sanctuary cities where, by those cities’ proclamations, all illegal aliens are welcome. (Progressive-Democratic Party mayors, like New York City’s Eric Adams, now are whining about having the influx of illegals into their cities, but those plaints are just that—empty whining. Were Adams, et al., actually serious about no longer wanting the illegals, he and his cohorts would cancel the sanctuary status of their cities.)