The late, great Hall of Fame baseball player and manager, Yogi Berra, was famous for such malaprops as “It’s déjà vu all over again,” and “It ain’t over til it’s over.” To some extent, those sayings apply to the recent U.S. presidential election, as well as cabinet member selections by President-elect Joe Biden. A Biden administration was assured, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the fraud case(s) presented by President Donald Trump. Soon after, the Electoral College certified Biden’s win. Meanwhile, the industry continues to grapple with oil demand deficits caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Four years of tumult coming. With apologies to Berra, what the upstream oil and gas industry will face is “déjà vu with a twist.” This means four long, grueling years in the courts fighting against officials in an administration that is geared against it. Some fights started during the Obama administration, but there is so much more that didn’t figure into that regime. For more details, please see Contributing Editor David Blackmon’s article on page 43.
Cabinet selections. Meanwhile, Biden is making Cabinet selections. For Secretary of Energy, he proposed to nominate former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, a career bureaucrat since earning her law degree from Harvard University in 1987, who does not appear to know anything about energy. Granholm supposedly was picked, because she’s “experienced in dealing with the auto industry.” This matters to Biden, who champions electrification of the nation’s vehicles and installing a national network of charging stations. The industry had held out faint hope that former Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz might re-take his old job under Biden, since he, at least, supports natural gas. However, Moniz was discarded in favor of a “diversified” Cabinet.
As regards Secretary of the Interior, Biden intends to nominate Rep. Debra Haaland, a first-term congresswoman from New Mexico, who, again, seems to know nothing about energy. Haaland, however, is a Native American from the Laguna Pueblo people in New Mexico, and thus fits Biden’s diversified Cabinet goal. Since earning a law degree from the University of New Mexico in 2006, Haaland has been a career bureaucrat and/or Democrat operative. And, she supports movements to implement the Green New Deal.
For EPA admistrator, Biden reportedly will nominate Michael S. Regan, who heads North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality. Again, as noted by the media, Regan is black, so he checks Biden’s box for a diversified Cabinet. Considering that Regan began his career at the U.S. EPA in 1998, and remained there until 2008, he seems better qualified than some. However, he also worked at the left-leaning Environmental Defense Fund from 2008 until his current position in 2017.
Last, but not least, to fill the new position of White House Climate Coordinator, Biden will tap the infamous Gina McCarthy, who gave the E&P industry fits while serving as Obama’s EPA administrator from mid-2013 to January 2017. McCarthy pursued such an anti-industry agenda at EPA that an industry friend of this editor referred to her as “The Wicked Witch of the East.” She will pursue her new responsibilities with zeal. The most charitable term that describes Biden’s energy-related picks is “mediocre.” At worst, they can be termed “horrific.”
Good news from Canada. We congratulate the Newfoundland & Labrador (NL) provincial government for good decisions. On Dec. 3, NL officials announced support for the West White Rose Project—the first project to be funded under the Oil and Gas Industry Recovery Assistance Fund. Husky Energy, on behalf of its West White Rose partners, will receive $41.5 million (50% of total project costs) to maintain jobs in the near term and protect the option of re-starting the project in 2022. Furthermore, NL officials said they will allocate $32 million of previously received federal funds to support the province’s offshore service/supply sector.
