CO West Slope Letdown: Boebert left, MAGA stuck around
Data Dump: Setting baselines to monitor "energy dominance" under Trump
When Republican Jeff Hurd was elected to represent Colorado’s third congressional district, I believe I heard a bipartisan, collective sigh of relief. Democrats may have been sad that their candidate didn’t win, but at least the new guy wasn’t Lauren Boebert. And, many of us hoped, Hurd would represent a return of the independent and pragmatic Western politician of old to western and southern Colorado.
We were wrong.
So far, Hurd’s performance in office has pretty much followed Boebert’s lead, politically, albeit without the gun-slinging and other outrageous antics. When one of his aides showed up to meet with constituents in Dolores, she fled after seeing the size of the crowd assembled there. Hurd, himself, chickened out from attending a town hall in Grand Junction for similar reasons. Instead of apologizing for refusing to listen to the people he represents, he accused the crowd of being George Soros-funded activists — a false and worn-out, right-wing anti-semitic trope that really needs to be retired. In fact, the folks were his constituents, including members of Indivisible and the League of Women Voters. These weren’t exactly molotov cocktail hurling radicals.
And when CPR’s Ryan Warner asked him about the mass federal employee firings that have hit his district especially hard, Hurd gave mealy mouthed answers, saying efficiency is good, acknowledging he had no idea how many employees had lost their jobs, and lamenting the possibility that some good people may have been terminated, too, though it was also clear that he wasn’t going to do anything about it, especially if it meant questioning or, God forbid, standing up to Musk and Trump.
Hurd introduced a bill that would move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction because it’s better to have management staff on the ground, yet he has not pushed back on DOGE’s plans to close federal offices throughout his district, including the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers offices in Durango. He has teamed up with Boebert to criticize Colorado for importing “foreign wolves” into the state and has parroted MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria in regards to Denver’s tolerance.
Now Hurd has introduced the Productive Public Lands Act to “unlock resource development on some of our most productive lands.” It would toss Biden-era Bureau of Land Management resource management plans — which he claims “locked up access to viable lands” — and replace them with fossil fuel-friendly ones with the aim of putting “us on a path to energy dominance.” Talk about inefficient: Those RMPs took years to develop and are the result of extensive studies, public input, and compromise. Trashing them is a perfect example of government waste.
Note to Rep. Hurd: Public lands are not locked up. Quite to the contrary. Unfortunately Hurd — like his predecessor — has chosen to let MAGA ideology and disinformation blind him to the facts. Still, I’ve got to try, so here I go again: The United States is producing more oil and gas — much of it from public lands — than it ever has before, and is the world’s leader in hydrocarbon production. Read that again. Then again. And keep doing so until it penetrates your thick skull so that you can stop wasting all of our time with your “war on energy” nonsense.
While drilling has shifted away from Colorado and is now centered on the Permian Basin, it has nothing to do with BLM regulations or resource management plans. It’s because western Colorado is rich in natural gas, not so much in oil, and there’s far less money in natural gas production than there is in crude oil. Nevertheless, oil, gas, coal, and carbon dioxide production from federal lands in Colorado (much of which are on the Western Slope) generated $205 million in revenue last year. Locked up? I don’t think so.
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As long as I’m on the topic of “energy dominance,” I figured it would be a good time to set out some baseline data for tracking the progress of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. As has been established, the Trumps and Hurds of the world believe that energy production from federal lands has been “locked up,” and that by “unleashing” it — i.e. rescinding environmental protections — the oil and gas industry will bring in a battalion of drill rigs, send oil and gas production through the roof, and bring down prices at the pump to make it cheaper to drive those gas-guzzling behemoths that now dominate the roadways.
It’s too early in Trump’s term to determine whether that’s actually happening or not, so let’s just check in on where we are and what has happened over the last four years. And we’ll keep updating these graphs periodically. Land Desk readers have seen some of these before. Sorry about that.
Production goes up after drilling activity increases. Drilling activity generally responds to crude oil prices. When prices are high, it’s more profitable to develop new oil and gas wells, so the drilling rigs are dusted off and head out into the fields. When prices are low, they are folded up and hauled back to the storage yard.
And lest you think that maybe all of that production is coming from private or state lands since, after all, the federal land has all been “locked up” by Biden’s purported war on energy, check out the revenues from federal land resource production for New Mexico and Colorado. Funny how they shot up right after Biden was elected, no?
The best way to get a feel for drilling activity is to check out the weekly rig count. So here it is. But a note to all you statisticians out there: The time intervals are uneven on this graph, in part due to my own laziness. But it still gives a fairly accurate picture of drilling activity over time, so it works.
The thing about production and rig counts, though, is they don’t really reflect White House policy. So how about the number of drilling permits approved by the Bureau of Land Management?
Now that we have a snapshot of where we’ve been and where we are in terms of oil and gas development, we can track where we might be headed under Trump 2.0. My guess? We’re going to see all of the above indicators begin falling soon. Sure, rig counts are staying steady, meaning production will continue to rise for a few more months. But after that, lower oil prices are likely to kick in, dimming companies’ enthusiasm for drilling, which will hit the rig count first and then production.
Oil prices are dropping — they hit sub-$70/bbl this week for the first time since 2021 — because OPEC decided to start pumping more crude and because the economy is struggling, which will likely dampen demand. The economy is struggling because markets are reacting unfavorably to the chaos Trump, Musk, and company are wreaking from the White House. Turns out that tariffs, trade wars, and haphazard termination of critical federal employees is bad for the economy. Gasoline prices will likely fall, too, except in places that rely on Canadian crude, where they might increase. So there is that. Of course, if you lose all your money in the plummeting stock market, it won’t really matter much, I suppose.
Speaking of tariffs, remember when I wrote about Trump’s trade wars and predicted that American whiskey and bourbon makers would be casualties? Turns out I was right. Kentucky distillers, especially the small ones, are already feeling the pain, and even large ones are smarting from Canada’s retaliatory moves. I suppose Trump will claim the Canadians started the trade war, just as he’s ridiculously asserting Ukraine invaded Russia.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Hurd is definitely not a Democrat and is not in tune with public land preservation. But he's nowhere near Boebert. He stood up for Ukraine very publicly in The Atlantic just days after the abysmal White House spectacle. "“Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator,” read part of the statement from the office of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado."
And he also stood up on the floor and decried the pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists.
That is enough to draw ire from the MAGA rabble and draw a primary with a real MAGA nutjob.
Thanks for the update, Jonathan. Always look forward to reading your reports.