Did Barack Obama Really Make America the Biggest Oil and Gas Producer?

In a speech at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston last week, former President Barack Obama said:

“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president. … [S]uddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas [producer] — that was me, people."

Two comments.  First, separate from whether it’s true (it’s not, see below), could you imagine George H.W. Bush ever bragging about himself like this?  I can’t either.

Second, it wasn’t former President Obama, his administration, or his party¹ that made America the world’s largest oil producer.  It was fracking.  It happened because private individuals came up with new ideas and new technology.  They raised private capital and leased private land.  And since fracking was largely regulated by states, they could drill in Pennsylvania and Texas and North Dakota, even if they couldn’t drill in New York.  And they did.  Oil and gas production went up, and oil and gas prices came down.  Heating and energy costs came down, too, which made a difference for people without a lot of money.  And carbon emissions were lower than they otherwise would have been because natural gas, which is a lot cleaner, replaced coal in the generation of electricity.

On the other hand, the Obama administration tried to discourage fracking.  In March of 2015, the Interior Department put new restrictions on tens of thousands of oil and gas wells on public land that used fracking technology, claiming the new rules were needed to safeguard the nation’s water supply.  Except that six weeks later, the EPA issued a report saying that fracking wasn’t causing widespread harm to the nation’s water supply.

America didn’t become the world’s largest energy producer because of former President Obama or his administration.  It became the largest energy producer because of American ingenuity and American private initiative, acting in places government couldn’t stop it.  To paraphrase something former President Obama said in another context, when it comes to America being the world’s largest oil produce again, no, President Obama, “you didn’t build that.”
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¹ See candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 position on fracking here.