The US has more than doubled its previous estimates for oil production from federal lands and waters in 2010, but the new numbers show production dropping from 2010 to 2011.
Total crude production from federal and Indian lands totaled 739 million barrels in 2010, the Energy Information Administration said late Wednesday in a revision to 2010 Annual Energy Review. In that report, the EIA last year had pegged crude production from federal lands at 348.8 million barrels.
Federal production has become a hot button issue in the wider political debate over rising gasoline prices. President Barack Obama routinely states that oil and gas production is on the rise. Republicans say the numbers show that production has shifted from federal lands, where regulations and taxes make it unprofitable to explore, to state and private lands.
The revised estimates satisfy a complaint by Representative Edward Markey, Democrat-Massachusetts, who had said that the earlier data failed to count millions of barrels produced in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico under the terms of a law that waived royalties in order to encourage risky exploration.
But the new data did nothing to quiet criticism from Republicans, who say that the numbers still reflect a decline in production from 2010 to 2011 -- the result, they say, of restrictive policies enacted by the Obama administration.
"The numbers have changed, but the results haven't changed," Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican-Alaska, said on Thursday.
Markey sent a letter in January to the EIA, the statistical arm of the Department of Energy, pointing out "troubling inaccuracies" in the EIA's Annual Energy Review for 2010. The report, Markey said, "is leading some people to have a dangerous misunderstanding of how much oil and gas is currently being produced on public lands."
Specifically, Markey said that the EIA erred in reporting that 384.8 million barrels of crude and 4.24 Tcf of gas were produced from federal lands in 2010. The numbers, Markey said, indicated that the EIA, relying on data from the Interior Department's Office of Natural Resource Revenue, was only counting oil and gas for which royalties were paid to the federal government.
The data, Markey said, excluded oil produced from leases issued under the Royalty Relief Act. It also excluded oil that was used to refill the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve under the now-discontinued royalty-in-kind program.
The EIA agreed to revise its numbers. The new figures not only add in the previously-excluded volumes, but also recalculate production figures from 2003 through 2011 based on a production year -- when the oil and gas was produced -- rather than using an accounting year -- when royalties were received.
"The sales reported in this paper provide a better proxy for marketed production volumes than those reported in previous summaries," the EIA said in its new report.
The EIA's previous data showed a 29% drop in production of crude from federal lands from 2009 to 2010 -- 544.3 million barrels in 2009 compared to 384.8 million barrels in 2010.
The revised figures show a 15% rise in production, from 642 million barrels in 2009 to 739 million barrels in 2010.
But the new data also adds in production numbers from 2011, which shows a drop of 12.5% to 646 million barrels.
The new data reflects a decline of 16.8% in production from the Outer Continental Shelf -- a result, Republicans say, of the moratorium on new deep water well permits imposed in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
