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Trump Can Make America Energy Dominant

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This past week Donald Trump renewed his promise of an era of American global energy dominance.  It's an achievable goal and a quintessential America-first theme that Trump should keep playing.

Trump recognizes what almost all his critics choose to ignore: We are entering an age of American energy renaissance that will last not just years but many decades.

While the Left keeps placing bad bets on expensive and unreliable green energy, Trump has a more robust and realistic strategy: Make the United States the 21st century Saudi Arabia. We are well on our way getting to that goal given the continuing story of the shale oil and gas explosion. Here are some facts to think about:

Since 2007, America has increased its oil and gas output by 75 percent with most of it coming from North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Since 2015, when Republicans and Congress passed a law ending the oil and gas export ban, the U.S. has exported more than 150 million barrels of crude.

At the moment, natural gas is the disruptive energy source that is blowing away the competition.  This is good news for America because we have far more natural gas than anyone, with perhaps the exception of Saudi Arabia.   This has the looks of something big.  The U.S. has by far the cheapest natural gas and is very capable of replacing the Middle East and Russia as primary suppliers to Europe and Asia.  

Thanks in part to Trump's energy vision, we are now building liquefied gas terminals that will lead to sharp increases in exports of our abundant natural gas. Bloomberg reports that ‎"since starting up last year, Cheniere Energy Inc.'s Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana -- the first major facility sending shale gas overseas -- has shipped more than 100 cargoes of LNG overseas."

Pipelines are necessary to make this energy future possible and Trump is already greenlighting these projects that were delayed or killed by Barack Obama - who hated fossil fuels.  

If we are to sprint ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to energy production, we will need to allow drilling on federal lands. We are talking about unlocking some $50 trillion of energy assets lying underneath us. Just the royalties, leases and income taxes generated from all of this energy treasure would raise about $2 trillion for the federal fisc.

The liberals left coal for dead, but the remarkable comeback in coal production has proven Trump's critics dead wrong. Coal production this year is up about 15 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal, and mining jobs are back as well. That's a testament to Trump's reversal of Obama-era regulations meant to bankrupt coal.   

We need cheap coal to produce steel and other manufactured goods in America, so coal production is basic to keeping blue collar and hard hat jobs here at home in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia.  Out of necessity, Big Coal is learning how to produce cleaner and cheaper coal every day - as the industry that still supplies nearly one-third of our electricity competes with natural gas.  

American production of oil, gas and coal could easily rise by $100 billion a year quickly and two to three times that level over time.  ‎That's about 0.5 percentage points added to U.S. growth right there and with tax reform, we are up above 3 and maybe closer to 4 percent growth fairly easily.  

Instead of importing $200 billion of energy every year, the U.S. and Canada could soon easily be exporting that amount.  Of course, the current low global price of oil - below $50 a barrel - has all producers struggling mightily as the world absorbs a wonderful glut of cheap energy.  But the amazing American frackers are discovering new ways of producing more and more energy at lower and lower costs.  

The industry that has gotten most financially flattened by low natural gas prices is green energy.  ‎As long as natural gas prices stay below $3 per million cubic feet, wind and solar are as viable as cold fusion for years to come.  

It is very simple: Without billions upon billions of government mandates, tax credits, production subsidies, and ‎other tax giveaways, there would be virtually no wind and solar industry today in the U.S.  

As my Heritage colleague Jack Spencer, an expert on energy policy, puts it, "The only way solar and wind create jobs is by spending taxpayer dollars. Those aren't real net new jobs because the government has to take a dollar from someone else to handout a dollar." ‎ What industry couldn't create jobs if the government kept showering it with billions of dollars of free money? We've been stupidly doing this since the 1970s.  Perhaps there will be breakthroughs that make green energy viable, but we've heard those unfulfilled promises now for 40 years.

No one knows where the future will take us with energy technology - can nuclear power make a comeback? But for now at least, no nation is better poised to exploit the new global age of shale energy.   Better still, this is a fortuitous outcome that won't cost the government money (as opposed to the green energy racket), but will raise trillions of new tax dollars to fund public programs.  

‎It's a tribute to Trump's vision and gut instincts that a real estate developer from the Northeast gets that when so many so-called energy experts, including Obama, don't.  
 
Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works and an economic contributor with CBN. 

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About The Author

Stephen
Moore

Stephen Moore is a contributing author for CBN News. He is chief economist at The Heritage Foundation, a position he has held since January, 2014. Previously, Moore wrote for The Wall Street Journal and was also a member of The Journal’s editorial board As chief economist at Heritage, Moore focuses on advancing public policies that increase the rate of economic growth to help the United States retain its position as the global economic superpower. He also works on budget, fiscal and monetary policy and showcases states that get fiscal houses in order. Moore’s early career was shaped by three