Oct. 15 (UPI) -- The Trump administration has vowed to open up public land to usher in an age of American energy dominance but in the Western United States there is little frontier left.
More than 81% of public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management in the Western United States are already open for oil and gas production leasing, according to a report by The Wilderness Society, a nonprofit organization focused on conservation.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there is much more oil and gas that can be extracted from federally managed public lands, according to a report published in June. It estimates there are 29.4 billion barrels of oil and 391.6 trillion cubic feet of gas that are technically recoverable, meaning they can be produced using currently available technology and industry practices.
"This is an acceleration and amplification of what we saw in the energy dominance agenda under the first Trump administration," Ben Tettlebaum, director and senior staff attorney for the Wilderness Society, told UPI. "What is distinct right now is its claim for wanting so-called energy dominance, particularly leveraging our shared public lands for that use. It seems it's trying to leverage that use above all others."
