This is Part 2 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

This post consists entirely of a letter from Senators David Vitter (R, LA), Jeff Sessions (R, AL), and John Cornyn (R, TX) to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar regarding “claims” made by the Secretary about energy production in the US.  I lay these lies off on Obama because, in the end, Interior is a Department within the Executive Branch and because Salazar, like all Cabinet appointees, is Obama’s man, serving at Obama’s pleasure (who can demand the Secretary’s resignation at any time, even though formal firing is done via Congressional impeachment), and so his words are what Obama instructs or permits him to speak.

Dear Secretary Salazar:

We are concerned with the veracity of statements you made in recent weeks regarding domestic energy production on our federal resources.  These statements are similar to claims made by other members of the Administration including the President himself.  As you may know, the federal government owns almost 2.5 billion acres of mineral estate, an area larger than the entire land mass of the United States.  As director of the Bureau of Land Management, Robert Abbey, testified this month, oil production on our federal property is actually down 14% and offshore production from federal areas is down 17% from only a year ago.  Just last week, the Congressional Research Service issued a report revealing that 96 percent of the increase in domestic oil production since 2007 has occurred on non-federal lands.  It further revealed that in 2011 production on federal public lands has actually declined by an average of 275,000 barrels per day.  Oil production on private lands is indeed up year-over-year, but the Administration does not manage private lands and should not attempt to take credit for private market decisions.

Oil production on federal lands increased in 2009 and 2010 as a result of leasing and permitting decisions made before your Administration took office.  However, the falloff in leasing and permitting actions under the Obama Administration is apparent, and even your own Energy Information Administration anticipates continued falloff in production in 2012 and beyond.

We also ask that you rectify the President’s claim that we only have 2% of the world’s oil.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as even the Washington Post reported last week.[1] He bases this statement on US “proved reserves” but the US Energy Information Administration has stated that proved reserves is “not an appropriate measure for judging total resource availability in the long-term.” As Secretary of Interior, surely you are aware of the vast oil resources we possess both onshore and offshore that are currently off limits due to this Administration’s combined actions.  America is endowed with resources that exceed a TRILLION barrels of oil.[2]

According to the Institute for Energy Research, “USGS estimates that unconventional US oil shale resources hold 2.6 trillion barrels of oil, with about 1 trillion barrels that are considered recoverable under current economic and technological conditions.  These 1 trillion barrels are nearly four times the amount of oil resources as Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves.
We provide the following examples of what we would view as further inaccurate statements by the Administration regarding the state of federal energy production and resources:

1. Claim: “Expanding offshore oil and gas production is a key component of our comprehensive energy strategy to grow America’s energy economy, and will help us continue to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create jobs here at home.” Secretary Ken Salazar, DOI Press Release 1/26/2012

Fact: You made the two most pivotal decisions to shrink domestic offshore energy production over the last three years that could have been made.  First, you eliminated the 2010-2015 OCS lease plan that would have opened areas of the Atlantic, four geologic basins off S.  California, one geologic basin off N.  California, while expanding areas in Alaska, including the Cook Inlet.  Instead, you have proposed a new 5-year plan that excludes all of the areas of the OCS where the moratorium was lifted in 2008, and reduces the number of planned lease sales by roughly half.  Essentially, the moratorium lifted by President Bush and a Democrat Congress in 2008 will continue in effect for a decade under your plan.

1. Claim: The proposed 5-year offshore lease plan will “make more than 75 percent of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas estimated on the OCS available for development.” Secretary Salazar, DOI Press Release 11/08/2011

Fact: These numbers distort the facts.  The Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is 1.76 billion acres.  Of that 1.76 billion, less than 35 million acres are actually leased (less than 2%).  Your proposed 5-year lease plan does not open a single new lease planning area, and therefore we have no way of knowing what estimates of “technologically recoverable” oil in all of the areas that remain off limits are because you have chosen to keep them off limits.  Most of our OCS has not been explored for decades, and providing access to only a fraction gives us no clue what is truly there.

A more accurate statement is that your 5 year plan opens 75% of the oil and gas in areas where we think it exists because we have drilled there.  We don’t know about the vast majority of the OCS that isn’t leased, much of which has not been assessed with the benefit of new information for a quarter century.

1. Claim: “Since we put in place new safety standards in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, we have approved more than 400 drilling permits.  In fact, we are now permitting at levels seen before the spill, all while meeting these important new standards.” Secretary Ken Salazar, 3/12/2012

Fact: There exists no evidence that permitting for production has indeed reached pre-moratorium levels.  In fact, the families impacted in the Gulf are still reeling from the impacts of the slowed pace of permitting.  Exploration and permitting have yet to recover to pre-2010 levels on account of the moratorium and ensuing permitorium on shallow and deepwater permits.  According to one recent study, “Prior to the deepwater drilling moratorium, the US oil and natural gas offshore industry was forecasted to grow significantly due to identified prospects, mostly in the deep water.  With the establishment of the moratorium and the subsequent slowdown in the issuance of drilling permits at all water depths, an estimated $18.3 billion of previously planned capital and operational expenditures did not occur in 2010 and 2011.”[3] The study further concludes that the permitting challenges have already cost 90,000 jobs.  It is of importance to note that the moratorium was never endorsed by the National Academy of Engineers, as you had attempted to represent.  An Inspector General investigation was required to uncover the political influence and misrepresentation by the White House and your office in an important scientific document.

1. Claim: “The fact of the matter is that we are producing more from public lands, both oil and gas, both onshore as well as offshore, than at any time in recent memory.  And when you look back at the years of 2009, 2010, and 2011, we’ve continued to make millions and millions of acres of the public estate available both on the land, as well as on the sea.” Secretary Ken Salazar, 3/12/2012

Fact: As we pointed out earlier in this letter, there is significant lag time to production after the process of leasing.  Presumably this is the reason for your repeated observation that “there is no immediate fix” for higher gas prices.  After a company has leased property they then have to explore, develop and produce, with each stage requiring new permits and compliance with federal processes.  The production gains we saw in 2009 and 2010 were the result of leasing and permitting that occurred in the Clinton and Bush Administrations, and was just beginning to come online.  However, by 2011 we began to experience the impacts from the moratorium and falloff of leasing and permitting under your leadership.  Total oil production on federal lands is down 14% over the previous year, offshore is even worse at down 17%, and federal lands saw the fewest number of new onshore leases since 1984.  You also failed to hold a single offshore lease sale in fiscal year 2011.

As a further example, in 2008 the industry spent $2.6 billion to obtain 487 leases in the Chukchi Sea for production offshore Alaska.  So far, not a single well has been drilled on any of these leases.  There have also been numerous new regulatory roadblocks and permit withdrawals from federal onshore production since you took over leadership of the Agency.  Examples of onshore leasing challenges include your withdrawn and slowed leasing in the West, including Montana and the Dakotas.

In July of 2008, then as a United States Senator, you had an opportunity to support increasing domestic energy production, if the price of gas increased beyond a certain threshold.  You repeatedly objected to increasing domestic energy production, even if the price of gas were to have reached $10 per gallon.

Although gas prices are not $10 per gallon, they are increasingly impacting our economy and fellow Americans, particularly low-income and middle-class families.  We are hopeful that similarly to Secretary Chu, you have reevaluated your position on gas prices and will redirect your efforts to alter what the agency has done to limit future production, and will instead work to develop our truly vast domestic oil resources, resources that well exceed “2%” of the world’s oil.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/pinocchios-obama-gets-a-downgrade-romney-an-upgrade/2012/03/21/gIQAX7uPSS_blog.html#pagebreak
[2] NORTH AMERICAN ENERGY INVENTORY, Institute for Energy Research, December, 2011. http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/energy-overview/oil-shale/
[3] The State of the Offshore U.S. Oil and Gas Industry, An in-depth study of the outlook of the industry investment flows offshore, Quest Offshore Resources, Inc., December 2011.

Sincerely,

Jeff Sessions
David Vitter
John Cornyn

Every politician makes promises in the course of his campaign for election, serious promises and frivolous, that go unkept for one reason or another.  Presidential candidates are no exception , and the promises made by the current Democratic Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, during the course of his 2008 campaign are legion: his promise to keep unemployment under 8%, if Congress would only pass his $800 billion stimulus bill in 2009 comes to mind (unemployment rose above 10% within months of passage and has remained above 8% since), as does his promise to ban lobbyists from his administration (followed by his hiring lobbyists into his Executive Branch, including the president of a lobbying firm to be his envoy to the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India region).  So does his promise to be open and transparent, with legislation being written in public (followed by Obamacare and Dodd-Frank being written behind locked doors and back rooms so secretively that even then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had to push for passage of Obamacare “so that we may know what is in it.”  And so on.

But I’m not concerned here with broken campaign promises.  Instead, I’m going to write about the outright lies that Obama has made since he took office, taking them in no particular order, but with some rough grouping by general topic.  With that, this is the first in a series of posts I’ll be making this month about the lies of my President.

First up, from Obama’s February speech at the University of Miami on “home-grown energy,” and Investor’s Business Daily‘s fact checking of some of his claims:

“We’re focused on production.”

Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.

Obama has chosen almost always to limit production.  He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.

His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index.  The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011.  Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”

and

“The US consumes more than a fifth of the world’s oil.  But we only have 2% of the world’s oil reserves.”

Fact: Obama constantly refers to this statistic to buttress his claim that “we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices.” The argument goes that since the US supply is limited, it won’t ever make a difference to world prices.

It’s bogus. New exploration and drilling technologies have uncovered vast amounts of recoverable oil.

In fact, the US has a mind-boggling 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to “fuel the present needs in the US for around 250 years,” according to the Institute for Energy Research. The problem is the government has put most of this supply off limits.

Here’s more concerning the “focused on production”…claim, via Power Line who quote from Greenwire, a New York Times specialty publication:

Domestic oil production may be at an all-time high nationwide, but the increase is primarily occurring on state and private lands rather than on federal land and waters, where production appears to have dropped significantly in 2011, according to the most recent government data.

Production of natural gas on public lands and waters in fiscal 2011 dropped 11 percent from the previous year, according to Interior Department data.  Oil production dipped nearly 14 percent…

Finally, here are four graphs that illustrate Obama’s lies about Federal “focus on production,” from the New Orleans Regional Economic Alliance.  They speak for themselves.  And nothing has changed in the year since they were formed.