Brock Yordy:

Good morning and welcome to episode 142 of The Driller Newscast, the industry's update on the news and stories and policy impacting the drilling and construction industry.

I'm your host, Brock Yordy, and this week let's head to D.C. as we meet the professionals leading the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the United States Geological Survey. Our feature this week is Drill Better Driller: Unleashing America's Drillers for Energy Independence. I want you to think about our professionalism and what we need to do to be good drilling professionals, good environmental stewards, and good advocates for the progression of drilling. 

For safety this week, we're going to do it right here. Our favorite weatherman, Phil the groundhog, saw his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter. Ironically, winter ends every year at the same time: in six weeks, on March 20th. But with that said, let's think about the last couple weeks of excessive cold weather events, how the jet stream has shifted from having three inches of snow in Houston to Louisiana, Atlanta to Florida. We really need to be thinking about our cold weather plan: what we have in place for slips, trips, and falls; what we have in place to ensure that our people are using the right protective equipment, that they have enough gloves; that we're making good choices; that we understand, as the temperatures drop, how we need to be handling those icy surfaces, how we need to be handling tooling. What is your cold weather policy? Phil has just given us an update. It's saying we have some more cold times coming. This is across the country, even into our south, southeast. What do you have in place? We need to keep our people safe. We need to be protecting them from extreme weather events and understanding how our equipment, tooling, project and people interact with this extreme weather change. Go out, be safe.

For this week in the news, we're heading to D.C. We got a lot of new administrators that are operating agencies that 100% impact the drilling and construction industry from OSHA, where we're still waiting for an appointment, to the United States Geological Survey, the EPA, the Department of Energy and who we have as Secretary of the Department of the Interior. 

So let's go ahead and start with the EPA, where Lee Zeldin was sworn in as the 17th administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, vowing to uphold the agency's mission while emphasizing both environmental protection and economic growth. I want you to think about how often we're hearing this right now in relation to the executive order we're going to talk about today on Unleashing America's Minerals, unleashing our drillers. We are talking about environmental protection while encouraging economic growth. For the past 12-plus years, we have had some of the best releases in land and opportunities to mine, to drill for fossil fuels, to open up access for ground-source geothermal, for geothermal energy. It is cute that now, suddenly, we are concerned that we aren't allowing enough economic growth. Zeldin, who is a former congressman from New York, took the oath of office in a ceremony attended by agency officials, government leaders and energy supporters, chemical supporters, water, groundwater, environmental protection supporters, many people there with many comments. This is what I need you to think about with Lee Zeldin as we step into this. In his first remarks as that administrator, he pledged to continue efforts to ensure clean air, water, and land while maintaining policies that support economic prosperity. Here's his quote: "The American people elected President Trump last November in part due to serious concerns about upward economic mobility and their struggle to make ends meet." He continues with, "We can and we must protect our precious environment without suffocating the economy." He adds emphasizing the need for an approach that supports all sources of energy. 

This is a hard one for me, everybody, because our secretary of the Department of the Interior, former governor of North Dakota, North Dakota versus the EPA, he has led multiple cases on deregulating the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, I want you to understand that before the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, we had astronauts heading into space, going to the moon, taking photos of our country and of the surface of the earth and seeing the major pollutants and impacts we are having. You can go back and look at the Love Canal. You can look at Parkersburg, West Virginia with the massive issue with PFAS and where it all started. There are plenty of situations here, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring talking about DDT. We have to be smart about protecting our environment, and economic growth needs to happen with responsibility. He states that "It's my honor to serve as the 17th Environmental Protection Agency administrator. Under President Trump's leadership, we will take great strides to defend every American's access to clean air, clean water, and clean land. We will maintain and expand the gold standard of environmental stewardship and conservation that President Trump set forth in his first administration while also prioritizing economic prosperity." We have a lot to unpack there, and we'll see. I have high expectations for us protecting our environment, and let's see if we can follow through with it.

Next, Chris Wright is going to be the head energy secretary. He's to be confirmed, he has said that climate change is a real and global issue, but he has also slow-rolled the concept of global warming. Chris Wright has had comments that said climate change is a real and global phenomenon. He has acknowledged that burning fossil fuels causes climate change. He has said that climate change is a global challenge that we need to solve. So if we can get Zeldin and Wright on the same page, this is a big thing, and we need to consider all of those impacts and what is going to happen. Energy independence comes from a holistic approach of geothermal for energy and heating and cooling, wind and solar.

Now as we move from the EPA and the Department of Energy, we get to OSHA, where, as you can notice, Doug Parker is gone. We have a deputy administrator in there, but there are many vacancies right now in OSHA and we have lots to do. I am very curious to see how, with all of the policies that we worked towards in the last few years to protect workers, we continue; and as we see these come out, we'll talk. I want you to go to osha.gov or epa.gov and read some of the policies that are out there and I want you to see the warning header at the top that says, "This information may not be up to date or reflect with the 2025 administration." Environmental regulations and health and safety regulations are written in the blood of mother nature and human beings working on the job. We need to consider that.

Now, the United States Geological Survey, a science organization that has been very instrumental in everything that we do in drilling, does not have a new director, and the former director, Applegate, has moved to the role of chief scientist. Dr. Ryker has stepped in as acting director, which if we go back and look at her great work, she has worked as the Associate Director for Energy and Mineral Resources, where she oversaw the USGS's science supply chain analysis and mapping of energy mineral resources. This includes the full lifecycle of mineral resources, from definition to supply to demand to extraction, trade and the economic environmental constraints and impacts of these resources' extraction and disposal; spent a lot of work on mine waste and energy waste within her direction. All of this. I want to get to how much we saw the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation work with releasing water, work with land management, work with what we need for allotment of water. The USGS is led by the Department of  the Interior. Although the president appoints the director of the USGS, the head of the Department of the Interior, who is newly-appointed secretary, Doug Burgum, two-time governor from North Dakota, he is leading the charge. And I want you to understand that we've covered him in the Newscast before and in June 2022, he was the first one to come out cheering the Supreme Court's decision over the EPA rules for regulating greenhouse gases, and that was in the case EPA versus North Dakota. He had a statement saying this: "The Supreme Court ruling today is a tremendously significant decision for state's rights and for consumers. This ruling puts a halt to federal overreach including far-reaching EPA-proposed rules that infringe not just on states' but congressional authority."

So, as we start talking about carbon capture and decarbonization and everything that we need to protect our environment and our nation and continue to grow our civilization, it's got to be a holistic approach, and we have to be smart and use science and fundamentals to back this, and that's the biggest piece that I can say in protecting our environment. I want you to consider — from Sackett versus EPA to the Chevron doctrine, to the Good Neighbor policies, to EPA versus West Virginia on air quality, on greenhouse gases, North Dakota versus the EPA — the EPA is there so that we don't have fires on rivers, so that we don't impact air quality across the state into other states, into interstate issues. I'm excited to see where we can go with our new administration and these newly-appointed professionals. But above all else, we have to understand greenhouse gas is impacting our way of life, not only here in the United States and North America, but throughout the world.

For this week's feature, we got some big responsibility here with Unleashing America's Energy, with unleashing America's minerals. We in the drilling and construction industry have an awesome opportunity in the next four years to help continue our civilization for the betterment of humankind, but with huge responsibility. I spoke about this last week, but I want you to consider that drill, baby drill was chanted by the head of the Republican party 2008 and concerns of not enough leases opened up and the ability for us to drill where we needed to. We have made our livelihood out of drilling throughout the United States, throughout North America, and we've done that by being drilling professionals, by being stewards of the environment and by understanding what we need to do to help progress civilization. So, I want to throw out that term, “drill, baby drill”. We're going to be drilling professionals with "drillers, better drillers," and I want to start by giving some insight into the history of how drilling has influenced the world, both positive and negative.

 The earliest discovery of the influence of drilling on humankind was found in Egypt, dating back to 3000 BCE. A group of archeologists found granite and quartz cores created by Egyptian drillers. These cores sparked a debate that has lasted for over 140 years now on what type of bits, what type of cutter heads were utilized. At the same time, in the first millennium BC, we saw other significant utilization of drilling to create large water wells for populations in Persia. There were underground aqueduct systems designed to harness aquifers and transfer water throughout the Middle East without the impact of evaporation, natural disaster or war. I want you to think about what we are doing right now and climate change and that this was happening for millennia. At the same time as this was happening in the Middle East, the earliest written record and evidence of large-supply water wells was in China 1000 BC. The Chinese developed water well lifecycle programs to protect and maintain well production and capacity. The Chinese developed the spring pole drilling method, which 2,500 years later found its way into early American history and evolved into the cable tool drilling and harnessing. Groundwater allowed humanity to explore and establish centers of civilization away from coastal regions. As we look at climate change and the possibility of being at three degrees Celsius-plus by 2100, being away from coastal regions is imperative to our livelihood. Drilling assisted in the discovery of precious metals, influencing the Renaissance period where even Leonardo da Vinci found time to develop a rotary drill utilizing auger flights for subsurface exploration and holes. This continued man's progress into drilling. Without the ability to drill and explore the subsurface, humankind would not have the minerals or energy resources to initiate the industrial revolution, which in turn had the greatest impact on drilling by mechanizing drills and drilling support equipment.

Considering where we are today versus where we were a hundred years ago in drilling technology, we as drillers supported industrial progress, increasing the population. And to put it into perspective, in 1803, we moved from a global civilization of 1 billion people to 2 billion people in 1928 and 3 billion people in 1960. After that, the snowball rolling downhill grew by a billion people every 12 years to today, where we're at over 8 billion people. Now, why I speak about this and "driller, better driller" from our water resources to water conservation, to energy resources to responsible mining to all of this is because, as we look at our agencies and we look at unleashing our power, we have the power to make sure we're doing this responsibly. So I want to close this history lesson and I want to punch us in the gut with some reality. The latest estimate by the United Nations is that the global population will be around 10.4 billion people by 2100. We started the 2000s with 6.144 billion people and we'll end a hundred years later with over 4 billion more souls. So that's the right, driller, better driller. We progressed humankind to the 21st century and simultaneously pressed the global self-destruct button through convenience of fossil fuels and exploitation of our resources.

So as we look at this opportunity to unleash drilling with the executive order, Unleashing America's Energy, I want you to go and look at this executive order and I want you to jump past all the climate discussions and get to section nine, which is stated Restoring America's Mineral Dominance. And it starts like this: "The Secretary of  the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, administrator of the EPA and the chairman of the Council of Environmental Quality and the heads of any other relevant agencies, as appropriate, shall identify all agency's actions that impose undue burdens on the domestic mining and processing of non-fuel minerals and undertake steps to revise or rescind such actions." We have sovereign nations within North America — these are our tribal nations — who have asked for their resources to be respected so that we don't exploit their water, as we've seen with the Navajo Nation versus the United States, the Navajo Nation versus the State of Arizona. What is their water allotment? What are they allowed to mine? What are they allowed to utilize or sell? And this is where we start talking about such actions as we look at sovereign nations and we look at private property and we look at the opportunities. 

It goes on to state: "The Secretaries of the interior and Agriculture shall reassess any public lands and their withdrawals for potential revision." It continues with, "The Secretary of Interior shall instruct the director of the United States Geological Survey to consider updating the survey list of critical minerals including for the potential of uranium."

Next, it continues: "The Secretary of the Interior shall prioritize efforts to accelerate the ongoing detailed geologic mapping of the United States with a focus on locating previously-unknown deposits of critical minerals." Many of our major mines operated and owned in the United States right now, are Canadian operators. I want you to consider what we're getting into right now with this. As we talk about Greenland, we talk about Canada, we talk about unleashing North America's resources, locating previously-unknown deposits of critical minerals, these are our rare earth minerals. With President Trump, we had the Defense Production Act to go after these rare earth minerals. We continued it through the Biden administration. Here we are back. We need these for progressing clean energy, without a doubt.

Next, "The Secretary of Energy shall ensure that critical mineral projects, including the process of critical minerals, receive consideration for federal support. Continuing on the availability of appropriate funds, the United States Trade Representative shall assess whether exploitive practices and state-assisted mineral projects abroad are unlawful or unduly burden or restrict the United States' commerce. Next, the Secretary of Commerce shall assess the national security implications of the nation's mineral reliance and the potential for trade action."

Now we jump into, "The Secretary of Homeland Security shall assess the quantity and inflow of minerals that are likely the product of forced labor into the United States and whether such inflows pose a threat to national security." And this is all to happen within 90 days of this executive order. Finally, "The Secretary of Defense shall consider the needs of the United States in supplying and maintaining the National Defense Stockpile. Review the legal authorities and obligations in managing this stockpile and take all appropriate steps to ensure that the National Defense Stockpile will provide a robust supply of critical minerals in events of future shortfall."

This says, within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor, the United States Trade Representative and the heads of any other relevant agencies shall submit a report to the assistant to the president for economic policy that includes policy recommendations to enhance the competitiveness of American mining and refining companies in other mineral-wealthy nations. You can see where we're going with this. Minerals are important to the progression of our civilization. We are now in an administration that is going to recognize those and take all measures to secure them. Mineral rights, groundwater, strategic water reserves, strategic petroleum reserves, lithium, plutonium, tungsten — all the things we need to continue to progress. Finally, the Secretary of State shall consider opportunities to advance the mining and processing of minerals within the United States through a bilateral security dialogue.

So why are we saying all these things? Because we have multiple National Intelligence Agency reports over the last 20 years that state impacts of climate change on all resources that climate change is expected to continue to impact resource scarcity. What we need to think about is how this happens in our regions versus other regions around the world and how this impacts our water, how this impacts agriculture, how this impacts our position throughout the world and how we continue to look at Greenland, Canada, Africa, Latin America, and those economies that have the minerals we need for many developing countries. They're looking to secure water for agriculture and we have agriculture and we are looking to secure what mineral rights we need to continue to live the way we do, to progress technologies the way we do, to provide solutions to find those places.

I want to shift gears now and I want to talk about climate change and our greatest ally to the north and there was a first report that came out in 2008, "Global Trends for 2025: A Transformed World" from the National Intelligence Council right here in the United States and it states climate impact studies show by 2025 Canada will be spared several serious North American climate-related developments including lack of intense hurricanes and withering heat waves and climate change could open up millions of square miles of development. Access to the natural resource-rich Hudson Bay would be improved and be a significant place for trade, for commerce for agriculture Central Canada. Let's just look at our MidCon and go a thousand miles north and think about climate change. I'll make it simple for you. We had Napa Valley wines that were wonderful and then as that dry arid climate continued, what happened?

We had Oregon wines that were great, we had Washington wines and now we're seeing Western Canada wines. This is the same thing that's happening as we see the Ogallala depleted in the MidCon here. We're opening up longer growing seasons and it states the Arctic could be a geopolitical and economic bonus. Additionally, agricultural growing seasons will lengthen net energy. Demand for heating and cooling will likely drop and forests will expand into the tundra. It continues to estimate that we'll have an ice-free Arctic during the summer by the next 10 years. The two most important implications of opening up the Arctic is improved access to a ton of mineral resources, rare earth minerals that we need and shorter transit times and shipping. And that my friend's industry is exactly the importance of Greenland in Canada and what we're looking at as we see a northern sea route above Russia between North Atlantic and North Pacific could trim 5,000 nautical miles in a week's worth of trip time.

So as we watch us as the United States discuss with Canada and Denmark and Norway and we see this war with Russia, which there are plenty of territorial claims between Russia and Norway and Canada and Denmark and us, we're going to continue to see tension as the global power to date have to continue to be the global citizen that figures out best pathway forward. Because climate change is the thing we're combating. It's not other humans and other countries' drillers. It is up to us to be better drillers and not exploit these resources and exploit our groundwater and destroy the possibilities of being able to continue down this route. So we need to be drillers, better drillers, better drilling professionals. Thank you for joining us for episode 142 of The Driller Newscast. Check out thedriller.com. There is a lot going on and we need to be bipartisan and smart and have discussions and understand, and I open all the feedback and all the discussions. We know how to treat mother nature appropriately in our drilling. We are licensed professionals. We understand the opportunities and the importance of our interstate water and minerals and what that means to our nation. Go out and be a better driller. It's all I can ask of the U.S. industry right now.

Thanks. Have a great week.