When the CEO of Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) was informed that President Joe Biden had issued a moratorium on all new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and in federal waters, he was disappointed.
“It’s shortsighted,” said Stephen Waguespack, president of LABI. “Everyone in the oil and gas industry wants to improve the environment, which is obvious given how they have put major money and resources over the last several decades into improving the way they refine their product. So, this should not be a combative issue.”
More than 90% of Louisiana’s annual production activity is generated in the Gulf of Mexico and the oil and gas industry accounts for some 30% of the state’s GDP, according to data from the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association and the American Petroleum Institute.
LABI CEO Stephen Waguespack
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“If we take a more collaborative approach as compared to a combative approach as a country, we truly can become energy independent, find new efficiencies and technologies in energy production, and reduce our environmental footprint all at the same time," Waguespack told the Louisiana Record. "But we’ve got to do it in a collaborative way, not a combative way.”
Waguespack added that he’s miffed by John Kerry’s comments to Microsoft News that terminated oil and gas workers should seek solar panel manufacturing jobs.
“Just this morning, we were listening to an economist who did a study on the local economy,” Waguespack said. “He talked about a new solar farm that is being built right across the river here in Baton Rouge. It's great. We love it and everyone wants to have it built but it’s going to create one new job.”
According to Louisiana State University Economist David Dismukes, some 10,000 jobs have been lost in the oil and gas industry since the pandemic emerged in March 2020.
“For every oil and gas job that gets lost here, those people have to leave,” Waguespack said. “They go to either West Texas where there’s more private land instead of federal land, or they go to other countries to find those jobs and we can't afford to lose people. We struggle enough here with the tough economy of the last year to keep our people close to home. If we continue to lose oil and gas jobs at the clip we did last year, I truly worry about the way of life here in Louisiana.”
Waguespack predicts that if the moratorium continues, it will lead the U.S. to import more resources from unfriendly countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, which have weaker environmental safeguards.
“We were well on our way to becoming an energy-independent nation because we had access to the resources we have and we had an industry that was using modern technologies to tap into them and now Biden is taking a lot of those lands off the table,” he said.