Obama's misleading energy claims

Institute for Energy Research:

The Obama campaign just released a website that purports to provide “the facts of President Obama energy record.” This is an intentional effort by the Obama campaign to distort the President’s abysmal energy record. After all, energy production on federal land is down under President Obama and the Obama campaign is trying their hardest to hide and obfuscate this basic fact.

Obama Claim: “Since President Obama took office, oil imports have been reduced by an average of 1.1 million barrels per day.”

Reality: A reduction of imports has happened in spite of President Obama, not because of him.  More than half of the reduction is because the ongoing recession and much higher price have made fuel so expensive that consumers are using less of it.

In January 2009, when President Obama was inaugurated, the U.S. produced 5,154,000 barrels of oil a day.[1] By November 2011, the last month for which we have data, the U.S. was producing 5,874,000 barrels of oil a day. This 700,000 barrel a day increase isn’t happening on federal lands, for which President Obama would justifiably claim some credit, but on private and state lands.

The reality is that oil production on federal lands is falling, while production on private and state lands is rising.[2] There is a long term trend of decreasing oil production on federal lands. In fact, oil production on federal lands has fallen by 43 percent over the past 9 years according to the Obama administration’s Energy Information Administration.[3] And it has dropped rapidly on President Obama’s watch.

In fact, because of the actions taken by the Obama administration such as severely limiting the offshore areas where oil can be produced, cancelling oil leases, and withdrawing other oil leases, oil production on federal lands will most likely continue to fall. (More of the Obama administration’s anti-energy actions can be found here.)

Not only is the Obama administration making it more difficult to produce energy on federal lands, they are leasing much less lands than the past. The following chart shows the decline in leasing on onshore lands over the past 30 years. This lack of leasing on federal lands will only result in lower production on federal lands in the future.

Obama Claim: 2010 domestic crude oil production reached its highest levels since 2003.

Reality: This is true, but the average production per day for 2011 is only 0.3 million barrels per day higher than in 2009.  And, as noted above, the reason that U.S. crude oil production is increasing is because of production on private and state lands while production on federal lands is decreasing. The President cannot honestly take credit for the production on private and state lands, but he can take partial credit for decreasing production on federal lands.

Obama Claim: 2010 natural gas production reached its highest level in more than 30 years.

Reality: Yes natural gas production is up, but this is because of production on private and state lands because production on federal lands is decreasing. [4]

... 

There is more.

Most of Obama's energy claims are grossly misleading.  I suspect he has taken this position because he knows how vulnerable his record is on the facts.  I do not expect most voters will be fooled. and several of the facts posted by IER could be weaved into effective ads against Obama.