Editorial: The scorecard
The first 9 months of 2025 have been a decidedly mixed bag for the US oil and gas industry.
New Federal acreage has been made available for leasing. But, so far, little has been done with it. Fewer Bureau of Land Management acres—107,621—will have been offered in 2025 than the paltry 114,491 offered by the Biden administration in 2024. The last Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) outer continental shelf (OCS) lease, held Dec. 20, 2023, received bids on just 2.4% of 72.7 million acres on offer.
BOEM is developing an 11th OCS 5-Year Lease Plan to replace the current 10th program (2024-29), which included just three lease sales over its 5 years. The leasing schedule released by the Department of Interior on Aug. 19, 2025, calls instead for 12 lease sales through 2029, nine in the US Gulf of Mexico, and three in Cook Inlet, Ala.
The pace of approvals for new US-based LNG plants has also accelerated, but into a looming supply glut.
Industry wins in other areas have been more clear-cut. The rollback of multiple regulations will help both current bottom lines and the construction of future infrastructure. The cancellation of wind projects, likewise, is of clear benefit to the natural gas industry. Eliminating tax credits for electric vehicles will likely slow their adoption in the US (but do little to stem their advance elsewhere); likewise for still-ongoing efforts to remove limits on tailpipe emissions.
At the same time, however, oil prices, rig counts, and share prices are down, layoffs are happening, and gluts of one size and duration or another loom over not just the natural gas market, but oil as well. The price of WTI crude was ~$76/bbl when Pres. Trump took office versus $62-65/bbl for the first 2 weeks of September 2025. And this despite expanding geopolitical unease involving both the Middle East and Russia. OECD commercial inventories of crude oil and other liquids have been rising steadily since midyear (the peak of summer consumption) and will soon hit post-pandemic highs of 64-days’ supply, according to Energy Information Administration projections, which also predict continued inventory increases through 2026.
Hollow victories
It doesn’t do much good to get your project approved if the market won’t support its construction. Expenses to build pipelines, crude terminals, and LNG plants are rising, in large measure due to US tariffs on things like steel and aluminum. With costs going up, industry can ill-afford a reduction in prices for its goods.
But growth in global markets for same is plateauing. Overseas work on any number of energy transition related fronts—wind, solar, CCS, even hydrogen—continues apace, in some instances accelerating, even as the US rushes to push as much hydrocarbon energy into the market as possible. Global investment in new clean hydrogen, for example, has increased 47% year-over-year, reaching $110 billion.
There’s certainly a hydrocarbon price at which demand destruction for alternatives begins to occur, extending the market for the former. This balance is already part of decision making. But it seems unlikely that the first part of this equation—very low prices—is really what the companies producing, transporting, and processing hydrocarbons want right now.
Unfortunately, they may no longer have a choice. OPEC+ continues to reopen its spigots, its intent now clearly to reclaim market share; the US, and even Russia, be damned.
What US-based oil and gas companies need most is a predictable government that will keep at least an arm’s length from its business. Then maybe they'll be able to do something with all those new lease sales and plant approvals.