U.S. energy policy

By promoting free markets, free trade, and the rule of law, policymakers can foster an atmosphere in which citizens and businesses identify and pursue new innovations and opportunities, invest and build, and achieve unprecedented success by adding value across the nation. Government policies most conducive to energy abundance, reliability, and affordability are not focused on micromanaging or manipulating energy markets, but on establishing basic parameters and allowing free markets to work. 

With stable and unbiased public policies supporting open, competitive free markets, the energy industry and companies like ExxonMobil can help lead an economic resurgence with disciplined investments in new projects, new technologies, and new jobs that will help ensure reliable energy for the U.S. economy.

U.S. jobs and GDP
The oil and natural gas industry delivered $476 billion in benefits to the U.S. economy in 2010 – more than three times the amount it earned – and is one of the few U.S. industries that have added a significant number of jobs in recent years.  One study by Wood Mackenzie shows that opening access to energy resources that have remained off-limits could create more than 500,000 new jobs by the year 2025.

According to U.S. Labor Department data, American jobs directly involved with finding, developing and producing oil and gas rose by more than 50 percent in the last decade. These jobs – drillers, engineers, construction workers – have a multiplier effect on employment.  A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimated that each direct job in the U.S. oil and gas industry supports more than three jobs elsewhere in the economy.  All told, PwC estimates that the entire U.S. oil and gas industry supported 9.2 million full-time and part-time jobs, and that the total economic “value added” by our industry was $1.1 trillion, or 7.7 percent of U.S. GDP, in 2009 (the latest year available).

Revenue and royalties
The U.S. oil and natural gas industry is a major contributor of jobs and economic growth, both in the U.S. and abroad. Additionally, it is one of the world’s largest taxpayers, supporting local, state and federal government spending on programs and services that benefit millions. A study by ICF International has shown that opening access to resources currently off-limits would create as much as $1.7 trillion in government revenue over the life of the resources.

In fiscal year 2010, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) disbursed a total of $9.1 billion in royalties from onshore and offshore energy production.  While the U.S. Treasury received $4.5 billion, more than $1.8 billion was distributed to 34 states, and 34 American Indian Tribes and 30,000 individual Indian mineral owners received $407 million.  In addition to the disbursements to states, American Indians, and the U.S. Treasury, the Land & Water Conservation Fund received $899 million, $1.3 billion supported Reclamation Fund water projects, and the Historic Preservation Fund received $150 million.