Ohio Valley Mayors Aim For A Green Recovery, Occidental Says Oil Production Passed Its Peak, and More

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that passing another COVID-19 relief package before the election would be “difficult.”

"I’d say at this point, getting something done before the election and executing on that would be difficult, just given where we are,” he said at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

America’s oil production will never again reach the record 13 million barrels a day set earlier this year, just before the pandemic devastated global demand, according to Occidental Petroleum Corp.

“It’s just going to be too difficult to replace the 2 million barrels a day of production that we’ve lost, and then to further grow beyond that,” Chief Executive Officer Vicki Hollub said Wednesday at the Energy Intelligence Forum. “Over the next three to four years there’s going to be moderate restoration of production, but not at high growth.”

Wyoming’s energy industry limped along in September with price, production and employment indexes trailing far behind last year, a new report published by Wyoming’s Economic Analysis Division shows.

Pressure from a global oil price war, combined with the rising severity of the COVID-19 pandemic this past spring, walloped Wyoming’s fossil fuel sectors. Operators halted plans for new drilling, shut in wells and laid off workers in droves to respond to the drop in demand for fuel.

When newly elected President Donald Trump announced in 2017 that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, he said, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” 

The goal of the landmark Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015 by 189 parties, is to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.