This story caught our attention because it falls right into our wheelhouse. It's a tale of a government failure that is responsible for systematically reducing the supply of American oil and contributing to rising oil and gas prices from the early months of the Biden administration. At the center of it all, lies the incompetent implementation of a mathematical model by the Biden administration's bureaucrats.
Here's the background:
The Biden administration privately acknowledged in late April that a mathematical error is delaying the federal offshore oil and gas program, in a letter to industry leaders.
Richard Spinrad, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said a subagency “discovered a miscalculation” that has caused a massive backlog in permitting, in the April 29 letter obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Spinrad acknowledged the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) — the subagency tasked with analyzing the impact of offshore drilling projects on wildlife — has used faulty modeling on such impacts and, as a result, overestimated wildlife effects, delaying permitting on existing leases.
“NMFS understands the concerns of industry and is working with [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)] to expeditiously develop … revised regulations,” Spinrad wrote in the letter to the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA).
The NOAA administrator’s letter came in response to an April 5 letter from NOIA, the American Petroleum Institute and the EnerGeo Alliance, warning that energy producers had experienced significant permitting delays. In particular, oil and gas companies have reported delays in obtaining letters of authorization (LOA) from the NMFS to conduct pre-drilling activity, including seismic surveying and geological exploration, in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Biden administration implemented the faulty modeling through an April 2021 regulation, according to the industry groups. A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA and NMFS, said Thursday that the administration was “working to consider all possible solutions to expedite the rulemaking process to the greatest extent possible.”
What is the error behind the faulty output of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's environmental math model? It is double counting its estimates of the population of wildlife species in the Gulf of Mexico. Here's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Fisheries agency's explanation of what they've been doing wrong for more than a year.
In particular, while processing requests for individual letters of authorization (LOAs) under the incidental take rule using the methodology for developing LOA-specific take numbers presented in the rule, NMFS has discovered that the estimated maximum annual incidental take from the proposed survey activities and the total take from all activities that BOEM projected in its revised incidental take rule application were miscalculated, and are therefore likely to be reached much sooner than was anticipated for some species. NMFS contacted BOEM regarding this, and BOEM determined that, when it reduced its scope of specified activity in March 2020 by removing the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA) moratorium area from the proposed action, it underestimated the level of take by inadvertently factoring species density estimates into its revised exposure estimates twice. Generally, this miscalculation caused BOEM to underestimate the total predicted exposures of species from all survey activities in its revision to the incidental take rule application, most pronouncedly for those species with the lowest densities (e.g., killer whales).
By double counting its estimates of wildlife populations in the environmental math model it mandated, the Biden administration effectively imposes a much higher regulatory barrier to approving offshore oil drilling than is justified using accurate data. Consequently, offshore drilling permits have only trickled out during the past year, progressively resulting in today's artificially constrained domestic oil and gas production. The cumulative shortages from this reduced supply have contributed to the rising price of oil and gas in the U.S. since April 2021.
This is the kind of problem that should be very easy to repair. Unfortunately, as we've seen with other major supply chain problems involving container ships and baby formula, the Biden-Harris administration's preferred first response to the supply chain problems they've created is to let them fester without action for months before doing anything to correct them.
Previously on Political Calculations
- The Biggest Math Story of 2020
- Governor Cuomo and the Coronavirus Models
- The Limits of Microsoft Excel
- When Benford's Law Breaks Down
- Court Upholds Math Order of Operations
Labels: environment, math
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