“Chaos.” “A disaster.” “Uncertainty.” “Very negative.”

That’s a sample of the reactions to Trump’s first few months published in the latest Dallas Fed Energy Survey, which gives executives from nearly 200 oil companies headquartered in Texas the chance to speak anonymously about burning issues inside the oil industry.

The closely-watched oil patch survey released last week exposed an emerging gap between Trump’s MAGA movement and the financial interests of some of its biggest corporate funders.

Big oil poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s re-election campaign and down-ballot GOP candidates last year, including an $80 million advertising spree — not counting undisclosed “dark money” funding. Fossil fuel fortunes have funded Project 2025 and its backers, alongside even more extreme far-right Trump-era policy blueprints.

But Trump’s tariffs, rising steel prices, and his sledgehammer approach to the administrative state are starting to unnerve oil and gas executives — at least in the anonymous survey conducted quarterly by the Dallas Fed.

“The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” one comment compiled by the Dallas Fed reads. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry.”

“I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” another commenter said.

Trump’s push for $50-a-barrel oil prices also drew howls of outrage from the industry — at least in the Dallas Fed’s survey responses, which are cleansed of identifying details before they’re published, offering oil executives a chance to speak candidly.

Amid Trump’s tariff threats, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate oil — the kind of oil that comes from fracking in the Permian basin — collapsed this week to roughly $65. That’s a big problem for oil drillers, who’d told the  Survey that they need West Texas oil prices to average at least $65 a barrel to profitably drill a new well.

Even before that price plunge, oil and gas executives privately complained in the survey about “unstable capital markets” as well as “geopolitical unrest and the uncertain economic outcomes of the administration’s tariff policies.”

“We want more stability,” wrote another.

There’s perhaps no small irony in an industry whose products are one of the biggest drivers of climate change – the biggest source of instability human society has ever faced – demanding more stability.

But the oil industry was also one of Trump’s biggest backers in last year’s election, fueling his return to the presidency – so the survey results suggest a strikingly strong undercurrent of discontent. 

Oil and gas executives still said they expect to benefit from the Trump administration’s efforts to slash climate action, the survey showed. “Killing the climate change policies and instigating LNG exports, along with the increase in manufacturing and artificial intelligence demands, will increase natural gas consumption,” one comment predicted.

But in the near term, Trump’s other policies are striking fear and spurring warnings of financial calamity in the oil patch — with one survey response comparing the fallout from Trump’s economic policies to the pandemic-era time when oil prices plunged below zero.

“The administration’s tariffs immediately increased the cost of our casing and tubing by 25 percent, even though inventory costs our pipe brokers less,” one commenter said. “Rigs will get dropped, employment in the oil industry will decrease, and U.S. oil production will decline as it did during COVID-19.”

Back in 2021, as President Joe Biden took office, the Dallas Fed asked oil companies if they were “concerned that increased federal regulation will make your business unprofitable?”

Nearly 60 percent responded “Yes.”

And indeed, oil and gas drilling got a lot more expensive during President Biden’s time in office, the survey shows. Drillers said last month that oil prices need to average $65 a barrel for new oil wells to be profitable, up from $52 a barrel when Biden first took office.

But this year, the Dallas Fed also asked drillers to quantify how much they spend on “regulatory compliance,” asking them to include not just the cost of following environmental rules but all regulations, including things like worker safety standards and hiring rules.

It turns out, for the largest share of drillers, regulations add less than $2 a barrel to their total costs. Only a tiny handful estimated their regulatory costs top $6 per barrel. 

Most drillers also said their biggest expense wasn’t fixing or preventing leaks and spills or paying fines and penalties. Instead, “legal and administrative costs” — think filing for permits and paying Big Law lawyers — were the biggest item for most companies.

If regulatory compliance costs most oil drillers less than $2 a barrel total, that means slashing environmental rules — even eliminating all of the nation’s environmental laws completely — would barely make a dent in the cost of producing a barrel of U.S. oil.

That sub-$2 price tag also means regulations alone cannot possibly be to blame for the $13 a barrel average cost jump drillers said they saw during Biden’s time in office. There must be other factors — perhaps pandemic-related inflation, depleting shale oilfields, or even the impacts of climate change on the oil industry itself — playing significant roles as well.

Most oil drillers anonymously told the Dallas Fed they don’t see much of a chance the Trump administration will drive down their regulatory costs, with just six percent of drillers predicting their regulatory costs would “decrease significantly” during Trump’s first year in office.

“For the average onshore upstream operator, the current administration versus the previous administration regulatory regime shows no real change at all,” one commenter wrote in the survey. “We still get our permits from the Railroad Commission in Texas, for example, not the Environmental Protection Agency.” 

That’s a very different message than the industry’s trade groups publicly brought to the incoming Trump administration.

“Burdensome regulations and government red tape have made it impossible to build anything in this country,” the American Petroleum Institute wrote in a five-page “policy roadmap” released shortly after the election, for example, calling for Trump to roll back environmental rules.

The Dallas Fed survey’s unsigned “special comment” section gives a sense for growing displeasure and anger at Trump inside the oil patch.

“Oil prices have decreased while operating costs have continued to increase,” said another commenter. “I feel very negative about the short-term outlook for the oil and gas business.”

“The key word to describe 2025 so far is ‘uncertainty’ and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty,” said a third. “This has led to a marked increase in the implied cost of capital of our business, with public energy stocks down significantly more than oil prices over the last two months.”

Of course, if any one industry has played a central role in unleashing uncertainty, it’s the fossil fuel industry.

Big Oil specifically sought for decades to inject uncertainty into the political discourse. Back in 1998 — nearly a decade before the first episode of The Apprentice aired, back when Trump was a troubled casino magnate — leakers first revealed a secret multi-million–dollar campaign from the American Petroleum Institute to promote “uncertainties” on climate change in the public arena.

Plus, the oil those companies sell directly plays a major role in ratcheting up uncertainty not just for the financial climate, but also the physical climate of the entire planet. “Fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions,” the United Nations notes.

As a result, wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding have already become so damaging and unpredictable that the once-staid insurance industry is throwing up its arms and walking away from entire regions, creating “insurance deserts” — and experts say what we’ve seen so far is only a small taste of what climate change has in store for all of us in the coming years and decades.

Oil producers might still be funding climate deniers, but their own operations aren’t immune from the impacts. “Climate-related supply threats to the oil and gas industry have already begun to manifest,” the global risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft reported in 2021. The firm estimated that 40 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves could face “high or extreme risks” due to climate disruptions like that year’s historic Texas freeze, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and melting permafrost in Russia’s oil-producing regions. 

That said, not all of the oil executives surveyed were unhappy with Trump’s performance so far.

There are, after all, the vibes.

“The new administration,” one told the Dallas Fed, “brings positivity to the energy industry.”

And second — despite any anonymous discontent or uncertainty about profitability — drillers continue to drill.

Or, as one oilfield services company said simply, “We are all busy here.”

https://www.desmog.com/2025/04/04/oil-execs-warn-privately-that-trumps-chaos-could-be-disaster-for-their-industry/

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

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