Romney: Obama ‘shouldn’t be taking credit’ for energy production

Reporting from Shreveport, La. —  Mitt Romney took aim at the Obama administration’s energy policies in a speech at a natural gas well Friday, speaking on a topic beloved to the voters of Louisiana, which holds its primary Saturday.

“It was a huge mistake for him to try to hold off the energy production in this country by saying no to drilling in the gulf and slowing down drilling up in the Bakken region in North Dakota,” Romney said of Obama. “He’s made it harder to get energy in America and so he shouldn’t be taking credit for that.”

Romney spoke to a crowd of mine workers in hard hats and jumpsuits, and their families, at QEP Resources, which is drilling to reach natural gas in the Haynesville Shale, a productive area of gas mining in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. The company is using hydraulic fracking to reach the gas, a process that company leaders explained to Romney as they showed him drill bits, which looked a bit like silver Transformer claws. Voters stood in the hot sun as country music blared, waving signs that read “Geaux Mitt.”

QEP does not appear to have been adversely affected by Obama administration policies; according to its recent quarterly filings, it experienced 20% higher production in the most recent quarter and 54% higher oil production. Its stock has beat analyst estimates for the last three quarters.

Romney attributed the success of QEP to the fact that the well site is located on private land, rather than public land.

“If this were government land, you wouldn’t see that big rig back there,” he said, gesturing to the towering orange-and-white rig that was festooned with a giant American flag. “The reason there’s more production is that we have private lands that are able to develop energy. And we’re going to see that not just in private lands if I’m president but also in public lands as well.”

But a glance at recent data suggests that the state of national energy production might not be as dire as Romney made it seem in his speech. Shell has drilled 350 horizontal and vertical wells in the Haynesville Shale since 2008, according to the Times-Picayune, and there were 39 rigs drilling off the Louisiana coast at the beginning of the year, compared to the average of 42 working there on average in the three months before Deepwater Horizon.

Still, new regulations are slowing down the process at a time when there’s a huge demand for gas, said Michael Hecht, the chief executive of Greater New Orleans Inc., an economic development agency. An average of three deepwater drilling permits are being approved every month, a decrease of 48% from the permits approved the three months before the spill.

A survey completed by his organization estimates that 41% of offshore service and supply companies are not making a profit as a result of the deepwater drilling moratorium, and that 50% had laid off workers because of the moratorium.

Still, Hecht said, it takes so long to produce oil out of a well that no one administration can be blamed for current production and permitting levels.

“It is intellectually dishonest to suggest that the level of exploration today is due to current policies,” he said. “It’s due to policies that were in place seven-eight years ago.”

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Romney: Obama ‘shouldn’t be taking credit’ for energy production