By Timothy Gardner, Valerie Volcovici and Jarrett Renshaw
Washington (Reuters) -President Donald Trump on Monday laid out a sweeping plan to maximize oil and gas production, including by declaring a national energy law to speed up, rolling back environmental protections and withdrawing the U.S. from an international pact to tackle climate change to combat.
The moves signal a dramatic U-turn in Washington’s energy policy after former President Joe Biden spent four years seeking to encourage a transition away from fossil fuels in the world’s largest economy. But it remains to be seen whether Trump’s measures will impact U.S. production, already at record levels, as drillers chase high prices following sanctions on Russia following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“America will once again be a manufacturing nation, and we will have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth,” Trump said during his inauguration speech.
“And we’re going to use it.”
Trump later signed executive orders declaring national energy rights and withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate deal, the international pact to fight global warming. He also signed orders aimed at promoting oil and gas development in Alaska, reversing Biden’s efforts to protect Arctic lands and U.S. coastal waters, reversing drilling, rescinding Biden’s target for EV adoption, suspending of the sale of offshore wind leases and the lifting of a freeze on LNG export licenses.
Trump said he expects the orders will help lower consumer energy prices and improve U.S. national security by expanding domestic supplies and also strengthening allies.
“We will lower prices, refill our strategic reserves straight to the top and export American energy around the world,” he said.
Environmental groups have said they plan to challenge the executive orders in court.
The Biden administration had seen electric vehicle and wind energy technologies as crucial to efforts to decarbonize the transportation and power sectors, which together account for about half of carbon dioxide emissions.
The Biden administration sought to encourage the use of electric vehicles by offering a consumer subsidy for new EV purchases and imposing tougher tailpipe emissions standards on automakers. It also tried to encourage clean energy technologies such as wind and solar through tax credits that have drawn billions of dollars in new manufacturing and project investments.
The Democratic National Committee called Trump’s Day One Agenda a “disaster for working families.”
“Killing manufacturing jobs and giving a free pass to polluters who make people sick is hardly ‘America first,’” said DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd.
Overhauling the power industry
Trump had repeatedly said during his campaign, he plans to declare a national energy rights bill, claiming that the US should produce more fossil fuels and also increase power generation to meet rising demand.
US Data Center Power Use, a key driver of growing electricity demand, could nearly triple over the next three years, consuming as much as 12% of the nation’s power to power artificial intelligence and other technologies, according to the Department of Energy.
Trump’s statement seeks to ease environmental restrictions on power plants to meet that demand, speeding construction of new plants and facilitating the permitting of transmission and pipeline projects.
“This allows you to do what you need to do to stay ahead of that problem,” Trump told reporters as he signed the order. “And we have that kind of emergency.”
Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, a nonprofit group gearing up to fight Trump policies in the courts, said vulnerability.
The first Trump administration had considered using emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to try to implement a promise to save the declining coal industry, but never followed through.
Trump’s promise to replenish strategic reserves, meanwhile, could boost oil prices by increasing demand for oil.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Biden had sold more than 180 million barrels of crude oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a record amount.
The sales helped keep gasoline prices in check but plunged the reserve – designed to buffer the United States from a potential supply shock – to its lowest level in 40 years.
