https://www.westernjournal.com/montana-takes-matters-hands-restarts-dormant-oil-wells-amid-bidens-gas-price-explosion/
In response to rapidly rising gas prices, the Montana Petroleum Association has announced that wells in the Bakken oil fields are officially going back online.
Inflation, regulations and a lack of additional oil resources — such as those that would have been supplied by the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was canceled by President Joe Biden on his first day in office — have led to rising gas prices in the states, experts say.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month, energy prices were rising. In response to Vladimir Putin’s offensive, much of the Western world has imposed sanctions on Russia, disrupting its exports of oil and further exacerbating the pain at the pump.
Alan Olson, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association, told The Western Journal that up until this point, federal regulations have prevented many oil companies from producing oil.
Thanks to rising prices, oil producers can now cover that cost, making drilling worth it again.
According to KTVH-TV, the Bakken oil fields “become more stable between costs and profits” when the price of oil reaches roughly $80 per barrel, which are the prices America is beginning to see now.
However, as a company seeks to ramp up production, a lack of personnel and a shortage of supplies have become a major issue.
“When oil prices nose-dived due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Montana Petroleum Association says their member companies were forced to let go of employees. Now that the oil price is rising rapidly, it’s been a challenge to hire new employees due to record low unemployment numbers in the state,” KTVH reported.
In addition, Olson said that as producers began to increase production, federal regulations soon to be implemented by the Biden administration are creating a lot of unpredictability in the industry.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty that the industry is facing with upcoming new federal regulations,” he told The Western Journal. “You know, we had a lot of discussion over the methane fee that was part of the Build Back Better bill.
“I mean, that would have hammered the small producers. Actually, it would have hammered everybody.”
Hamstringing small producers with hefty regulations is a big deal, especially considering states like Montana “no longer have any of the major oil companies producing oil,” Olson explained.
“We’ve got a lot of very small, independent oil producers that, to meet up with some of the proposed new federal regulations, it’s going to leave them with a couple of choices,” he said.
“You either bite the bullet, spend the money, take it off your bottom line — which will cost jobs, which will also cause revenue to state and local government coffers — or you plug your wells and walk away from them.”
Many local and establishment news outlets have sought to fact-check the claim that the Biden administration’s policies — such as the Keystone XL Pipeline cancellation and an executive order that halted new oil and gas leases on public lands — have raised prices. ..