Newly installed US President Donald Trump has vowed to fully utilise America’s large oil and gas reserves to rebuild the nation’s power and wealth, speaking during his inauguration on Monday.
The president, at the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, revealed he will declare a “national energy emergency” to help to bring down prices prompted by an “inflation crisis” based on government overspending.
“We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.
“With my actions today we will end the Green New Deal, and revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our automobile industry and keeping my sacred pledge to the great American auto workers,” he added.
As they stand, the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) tailpipe emissions regulations would require at least two-thirds of all new cars in the US to be fully electric by 2032.
“In other words, you will be able to buy the car of your choice,” said Trump.
The Green New Deal calls for widescale public policy initiatives to address climate change, coupled with renewable energy job creation, and reducing economic inequality.
Richard Power, a partner at UK law firm Clyde & Co, and an energy specialist, stated in online comments that under “Trump’s second term, there might not be a bonfire of climate and energy-related legislation as some have feared and others hoped.”
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has been a “huge success in driving foreign and domestic investment and creating jobs in the US in clean energy projects, so risking those jobs by scrapping the incentives might be politically unpopular and he may quietly keep many of the energy policies and sustainability initiatives alongside issuing new licences for oil and gas drilling,” he added.
The president also said the US will “drill, baby, drill," during his address, and said America “will be a manufacturing nation again, and we will have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas that any country on earth has, and we are going to use it.”
He also vowed to fill up strategic petroleum reserves and export American energy all over the world.
Research from December 2024 from GlobalData, Offshore Technology’s parent company, noted that in the US, a “supportive set of policies and fiscal framework for the upstream industry, since the turn of the century, has been a bi-partisan agreement, despite notable differences in rhetoric. This underlying trend is what caused the US to gain incredible leverage in the global energy trade.”
Having increased oil and gas production from 17.7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (mmboed) in 2010, to 37mmboed in 2024, the US was able to sharply decrease its reliance on Middle Eastern oil.
The US has also cut O&G imports by 25% in the last 20 years, and was able to seize the opportunity, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to become a top supplier of gas to Europe, becoming the world’s largest LNG exporter in the process.
