US Interior Chief Pitches Resources on Federal Lands as Assets Worth Trillions

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary is making the case that the oil, gas and minerals in the vast federal lands and waters he is charged with overseeing should be viewed as part of “America’s balance sheet” worth trillions of dollars. 

Secretary Doug Burgum plans to tell thousands of oil and gas executives gathered for an energy conference that the sale of federal timber, grazing rights, mineral production and oil and gas development could be used to pay down the nation’s $36 trillion in national debt and create jobs.

“If Interior was a company it would have the largest balance sheet in the world,” Burgum will say during his lunchtime address to the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “We’re looking at the totality of our natural resources as national assets that must be sustainability developed to grow jobs and pay down our debt.”

The Interior Department oversees energy development, grazing and other activities on some 500 million acres of public land, 750 million acres of subsurface mineral estate and and more than 2 billion acres of federal waters. 

Yet no one has totaled up the value of those assets akin to a corporate balance sheet, according to Burgum, the former North Dakota governor who sold his tech company Great Plains Software to Microsoft Corp. for $1.1 billion in 2001. 

“I’ve been in Washington for a little more than a month and I can’t find anyone who can answer that,” Burgum plans to say. “We believe that the sum of our national assets is much larger than our national debt.”

It’s an argument that Burgum, who is also chair of the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, has been making in public and private to senators on Capitol Hill during his confirmation process.

“If we restrict access, we don’t cut a tree, we don’t use it for recreation, we don’t develop the minerals in a sustainable and smart way, then we are getting a super low return for the American people,” Burgum said during his Senate confirmation hearing in January. “It’s our responsibility to get a return for the American people.”

It’s also a markedly different approach from that taken by the Biden administration, which constrained development of oil and natural gas on federal land and waters amid an emphasis on conservation and battling climate change. 

“We’re actually holding oil and gas leases again on federal lands,” Burgum plans to say in his remarks. “And we’ll see a lot more of those.”

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