Not since the presidency of James K. Polk, circa 1845, has a single president made such a large change as Joe Biden in the territorial scale of the United States. Polk, however, expanded America’s domain by 768 million acres, adding Texas, Oregon, and Mexico’s ceded territory, while Biden has contracted it—at least in terms of useful access—with his “sweeping” January 6 order banning oil and natural gas exploration or development on 625 million acres of offshore territory.
Polk didn’t add all those acres to leave them untouched. Two decades later, President Andrew Johnson authorized an epic scientific initiative, called the King Survey, to get accurate information about the then-unknown resources in those territories to inspire future opportunities for use. There’s a lesson in that.
But first, Donald Trump will doubtless test the legality of his predecessor’s unprecedented shrinkage-by-fiat. Experts—and the recent history of similar attempts to reverse such executive orders—point to the likelihood of failure, or at least a long court battle. One solution will be for Congress eventually to revise, some would say clarify, the language in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gave presidents the authority to issue orders like Biden’s.
Meantime, Trump has also volubly returned to the idea of acquiring Greenland’s 420 million acres. Even if some kind of deal were sealed—say, a strategic partnership with a newly independent Greenland—the motivation is not just about defense strategy but also about future, yet-to-be-discovered resource wealth. Thus, it’s worth noting just how little we know about the resources, especially oil and gas, that reside in the far more accessible 625 million acres of continental-shelf territories that Biden has just made commercially inaccessible.
This brings us to an opportunity for soon-to-be President Trump. In addition to possible legal challenges, why not emulate the precedent of the Johnson administration’s great survey of 1867 to 1872? That initiative, undertaken by Clarence King (who became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879), was largely a scientific project, intended to gain information about “the natural resources.” King wrote that the survey was a “turning point, when the science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”
Such scientific tradition continues today, though more often in the unexplored territories of outer space. Last October, when SpaceX launched NASA’s $1.2 billion Psyche mission to survey a metal-rich asteroid, it wasn’t because anyone seriously thinks space mining is right around the corner. But, in the longer term, who knows? If we have no idea of the size of the prize, we will never have an incentive to pursue it. The same holds for our largely unexplored outer continental shelf.
Much of that territory has never been surveyed. In fact, some three decades have passed since the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has done any surveys. The government’s best guess is that about 100 billion barrels of oil exist there. Odds are it’s far more than that. So let’s find out.
The Biden ban keeps oil and gas companies from engaging in commercial exploration, never mind development, but it can’t ban government research. Why not boldly mount a modern-day, King-style “geological survey of the natural resources,” employing state-of-the-art technology, including modern AI tools? Likely, the research wouldn’t cost much more than the Psyche mission. Ironically, as a share of the U.S. federal budget in their respective eras, the Psyche and King surveys cost roughly the same.
Scientific surveys that assess the nature and extent of a nation’s natural resources have a long and storied tradition. For decades, and long preceding the shale revolution, the USGS has conducted studies of shale oil resources, on both private and public lands. A discover of vast, previously unidentified resources offshore would be consequential. Should the nation ever need those resources, Congress would be glad to have such actionable information, and a greater incentive to implement legislative fixes.
In recent years, the pace at which industry brings newly identified offshore resources into production has accelerated dramatically. Consider Guyana, where an Exxon-led offshore development went from discovery to production in less than five years. Total output will shortly surpass 1 million barrels per day—surpassing all but five of OPEC’s 12 members. As oil sage Daniel Yergin said, it “is the fastest-growing offshore oil development in the history of the world.”
Long-term, future-centric energy planning is critical. Despite trillions of dollars in cumulative spending over recent decades on alternative energy, the transition from hydrocarbons remains aspirational. The world today uses far more oil, natural gas, and coal than when the lavish green spending programs began. Oil use itself is now 25 percent higher than in 2000.
Oil remains the single largest source of global energy, supplying over ten times more energy than wind and solar combined, and powering the machines that transport over 95 percent of all the planet’s goods and people. Oil will dominate geopolitical and economic risks and opportunities for a long time to come.
And you can take it to the bank that we’ll see another oil-price shock someday. History shows that unpleasant, even destructive, price shocks can be triggered by a “black swan” event, or a combination of them.
Thus, the core energy issues for nations are likely to remain largely unchanged for the foreseeable future—that is: who supplies the necessary fuels (domestic sources or geopolitically fraught imports), and at what price (economy-friendly or recession-inducing)?
As populations and economies expand, leaving the Biden ban in place will shrink the role that the U.S. can play in meeting future global energy demands, remove an option to help moderate future price shocks, and weaken our geopolitical influence while strengthening that of others.
In the short term, the ban sends a clear message to global oil producers. One imagines quiet celebrations in Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia when it was announced on January 6. If the ban stays in place, it will damage both the prospects for, and the magnitude of, future competition from the technically formidable U.S. oil industry. A twenty-first century King Survey would send an entirely different message.
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