Gov. Cox calls on Biden to renew oil and gas leasing on public lands

The Smith's gas station in Kimball Junction on Wednesday. Photo: TownLift

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of gas in Utah is now $4.30, breaking the former all-time record ($4.22) from July 2008.

The average price for a gallon in Summit County is $4.44, per AAA.

On Tuesday President Biden announced a U.S. ban on Russian oil imports amid their invasion of Ukraine.

Europe meanwhile, is heavily dependent on oil from Russia, which is the world’s second-largest crude oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox on Monday sent a letter to the President encouraging him to eliminate any barriers to increasing U.S. domestic oil and gas production.

“I have consistently urged your administration, including long before this current crisis, to end your battle against developing American energy on public lands. It is more important now than ever that the United States and our allies produce the resources that will allow the world to move away from dependence on Russia and other authoritarian regimes,” Cox’s letter states.

More excerpts from the letter:

• It is strikingly inconsistent for U.S. policy to discourage European reliance on Russian-produced energy while simultaneously refusing the leasing and permitting of oil and gas development on our own federal lands.
• America’s tremendous energy wealth, including the vast oil and gas reserves beneath Western states’ public lands, could provide the fuel our European allies need to break away from Russian energy dominance.
• We need renewed oil and gas leasing on our public lands. We need support for the Uinta Basin Railway, which would increase Utah’s oil exports to refineries on the Gulf Coast to support both domestic and European markets.
• During the previous administration, the Bureau of Land Management issued an average of 115 leases a year for oil and gas development in Utah. Even the Obama administration issued an average of 81 each year. Since you took office, the Bureau of Land Management has not conducted a single oil and gas lease sale in Utah and has now canceled the small lease sale originally planned for later this month,
• The transition to a low-carbon, green global economy will take time. Meanwhile, the world and European countries will continue to rely on oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels while this transition occurs. So long as oil and gas extraction continues to occur around the globe, the United States must play a role as we produce oil and gas with far less environmental impacts than our energy competitors in Russia, Venezuela, and the Middle East.
• A similar dynamic exists with the extraction of critical minerals and rare earth elements essential to the production of batteries and other clean-energy technologies. Currently, China holds a near-monopoly on both the extraction and processing of many critical minerals, despite the vast potential for critical minerals beneath America’s public lands. Expansion of domestic mining and processing capacity would free America from Chinese dominance over critical minerals and speed the adoption of green technologies, including electric vehicles.

Two dozen other GOP governors called on Biden to do the same.

Last week, Sen. Mitt Romney told Deseret News reporter Amy Joi O’Donoghue: “If we decide not to be buying more Russian oil, we’re going to have to come up with some oil of our own. So that means our oil producers here have to be able to drill more wells in the Uinta Basin as well as across the country.”

This week, U.S. House Rep. Blake Moore, who represents parts of Summit County, told KSL Newsradio’s ‘Inside Sources’: “There is no reason to rely on an ounce of Russian oil when we can process it, we can do it better here in America. We can do it with better environmental standards. I am hypersensitive to the need to reduce emissions. It doesn’t help us to rely on foreign, particularly bad actors, with respect to this.”

Moore also said that shutting down the Keystone XL pipelines is one of Biden’s “most egregious fatal flaws” while in office.

The controversial $1.4 billion Uinta Basin Railway in eastern Utah was approved by the federal government last year. The 85-mile trail will transport crude oil out of the region and boost production.

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