(PatrioticPost.com)- In some locations in the United States, drilling permits have not been proceeding as planned. Now, reports are coming out that reveal that the Biden administration has admitted that the reason for the holdup could be a simple math error.
The Daily Caller recently reported that the White House sent a letter to leaders in the industry that said “a mathematical error is delaying the federal offshore oil and gas program.”
Richard Spinrad, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said that delays in permitting could be attributed to a miscalculation that happened when a flawed model was used to measure the impact that offshore drilling would have on the surrounding ecology.
Those models, he said, were used by the National Marine Fisheries Service.
In the letter that Spinrad sent to the NOIA, he wrote:
“NMFS understands the concerns of industry and is working with [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)] to expeditiously develop … revised regulations.”
In recent months, the Biden administration tried to show how hard they were working to curb rising gas prices, saying they were expediting the domestic production of gas and oil. Jen Psaki, then then-press secretary for the White House, said that the U.S. had approved thousands of leases for drilling.
Many people highlighted, though, that just because leases were approved, it didn’t mean there was any oil that they would find. Even if there were oil, they added, the oil companies would need to have permits approved before they were actually allowed to drill for it. And the White House was very much backed up on approving the permits.
Jan Kulmann, a Republican candidate for Congress, was very outspoken about this, explaining in a column for the Washington Examiner:
“In the course of defending the Biden administration’s refusal to issue new oil and gas leases on federal land, Psaki said there are over 9,000 unused leases already. So, why issue new ones? You might be fooled into thinking this is a valid point, but only if you know nothing about the energy industry, in which I have worked for 23 years.
“An existing lease means nothing if you cannot get surface agreements in place or pipelines close by enough to move the oil and gas. A new lease may be more promising for short-term production than an existing lease. But, whenever this issue comes up, Democrats try to make it sound like companies are just sitting on permits, irrationally doing nothing, and therefore no new ones ought to be issued.
“In short, this is misdirection — a deliberate effort to mislead the public with a falsehood that sounds plausible.”
Whatever the issue may be, it’s certainly embarrassing to the Biden administration that not only is it using poor reasons for justifying how it’s helping solve the gas crisis, but that it used poor math to determine whether to approve desperately-needed new drilling leases.
