A few weeks ago, Patrick Montalban called together the 20 people who work for his oil company in Montana to offer a tough choice.
He could lay off two workers, or everyone could take a 10 percent pay cut. They took the pay cut.
This is the oil business in America when the average gallon of gasoline sells below $3 a gallon.
Still, to hear Montalban and others in the industry tell it, even with crude below $60 a barrel, life is a lot better under President Donald Trump than it was a year ago.
Folks in the oil industry are used to watching oil and gasoline prices rise and fall like the tide. But they’re buoyed, for now, by political wins — hatcheting environmental regulations, pushing new fossil fuel projects and expanding drilling.
“We’re working on being happy,” Montalban, whose company operates low-production “stripper” wells, said in an interview. “This administration is working with us.”
The Biden administration, he said, “wouldn’t even talk to us.”
From Montalban’s perspective in Cut Bank, Montana, the pain his business is feeling is a reminder that the Montalban Oil & Gas Operations is still alive. If former President Joe Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris had won the presidency, the CEO is not sure it would be.
Times are challenging for the industry, beyond simply low oil prices. Oil and gas stock indexes are trailing the market. Employment is down, and some companies have had big layoffs. The country’s easy-to-reach oil is getting harder to find, prompting talk of a plateau or even “peak” in production. Trump’s signature tariffs are making many oil field supplies — such as steel pipe for drilling — more expensive.
And there’s plenty of griping in anonymous surveys about wild swings in policy mixed with tales of woe from low prices.
But policies are what Trump can control, and many industry leaders like the way they’re swinging right now.
The price of natural gas, unlike oil, is rising after years in the doldrums. Trump is pushing the policies that are creating the demand: more power-hungry data centers, a fleet of new export terminals along the Gulf Coast and an array of new pipelines to feed them.
Congress granted billions of dollars in tax benefits to the oil and gas industry in Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act while on a search-and-destroy mission for the renewable energy tax incentives promoted by Biden. Among the survivors: Biden’s expanded incentives for diverting carbon dioxide emissions to underground storage, which oil majors see as their path to thrive in a decarbonizing world.
Trump is seeking to expand drilling beyond even where some Republican lawmakers want to see it, and taking a machete to all kinds of environmental restrictions.
“He’s done things that make good sense,” said Dewey Bartlett, who runs a family oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I think he’s done a good job.”
Energy dominance?
The sanguine sentiments in the industry reflect the industry’s longtime alignment with Republicans and a particular affinity for Trump. But the industry also despised environmental policies under Biden.
The Democrat beat Trump in the 2020 election with little to no help from the oil and gas industry, and implemented a whole-of-government approach to reducing the damage done to the climate by the burning of fossil fuels.
Beyond simply promoting renewables, Biden paused new approvals for liquefied natural gas exports. He rejected calls to “ban fracking” and approved a major oil project in Alaska. But Biden also dramatically cut back on lease sales to explore for oil and gas on public lands.
“They were pretty blatant about wanting to put us out of business,” Bartlett said.
Still, oil and gas production kept hitting new record highs during Biden’s tenure — and records have continued to be set during Trump’s second term.
Oil executives worried during the 2024 presidential campaign about the prospect of a trade war that could dampen the economy and cool demand. Still, backing Trump was an easy call for many oil executives.
Trump wooed them with promises of deregulation, and they showered him with millions of dollars to fuel his return to power. And the president has delivered on deregulation with an avalanche of executive orders dismantling Biden’s agenda aiming at reining in the effects of climate change.
The White House, unsurprisingly, agrees with critics of Biden’s approach.
“President Trump is working with oil producers and leaders in the industry to ensure they have the resources necessary to Make America Energy Dominant Again,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers. “Thanks to President Trump unleashing American energy, Americans across the country are already paying less at the gas pump, as the national average for gasoline just dropped to a five-year low.”
Trump has over three years left as president, and the industry is still hoping for more. The oil and gas industry is still pining for an overhaul of an environmental permitting system its leaders say makes it too difficult to build pipelines and other infrastructure, including changes to the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Under the Trump administration, we’ve seen meaningful steps forward, from restoring predictable onshore and offshore leasing to advancing NEPA improvements and regulatory clarity that reinforce American energy leadership,” Justin Prendergast, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, a major oil and gas trade group, said in a statement.
If there’s any friction between oil companies and the administration, it’s caused by the tariffs that Trump has employed to shake up international trade. He’s proposed import taxes as high as 300 percent before backing off. Steel, used to drill wells and other oilfield equipment, generally faces a 50 percent import tax.
That’s increasing the cost of business, particularly for oil field service companies that help companies drill for fossil fuels.
“They are a path to mediocrity, not excellence,” Ron Gusek, who took over as CEO of oil field service firm Liberty Energy when founder Chris Wright left to join the Trump administration, said during an October earnings call. “They raise prices, cut profits, increase unemployment, diminish productivity and slow economic growth.”
Trump’s sweeping package of tariffs in April sent shares of oil companies into a nosedive along with those of many other industries before Trump backed off. But since then, much of the criticism has dissipated.
When it comes to oil and gas, “the market has more than recovered,” said Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “There has not been much handwringing that it’s holding firms back, driving up costs.”
‘God help us’
Companies have made clear that tariffs are hurting their bottom line, said Andy Lipow, head of the Lipow Oil Associates consulting firm, but they aren’t dwelling on them.
“They’ve learned how to handle the announcements,” Lipow said. “They made their statements. They moved on.”
Bartlett, in Tulsa, says he’s confident the tariff situation “will eventually shake out.”
Still, the swings back and forth between the Trump and Biden administration are troubling to the larger energy industry, said Greg Upton, executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies, which recently rolled out its Gulf Coast Energy Outlook. He said “policy uncertainty” was one of four major concerns he found in the survey.
“The sentiment is that these political swings are larger and they’re more dramatic,” Upton said. Because energy is a long-term, capital-intensive business with long planning horizons, he said, “that can be challenging.”
For Montalban and Bartlett, the bitterest pill in Biden’s agenda was a “methane fee” regulation of $900 per metric ton in 2024, rising to $1,500 in 2026. That, they said, would have put smaller oil producers out of business. And they said it was unfair because the older wells they manage don’t produce much and therefore don’t pollute much.
Trump and Congress killed the rule earlier this year, and Trump’s signature megalaw signed in July delayed implementation of the underlying statute for 10 years.
Montalban, who is chair of the National Stripper Well Association, said he’s met with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to discuss the future of the methane fee, and a committee of the stripper well association has met with EPA employees.
“They said, ‘Gee, I wish we would have known about you folks in 2022,’” Montalban said, referring to EPA workers. “A lot of people just don’t understand the different sectors of the industry.”
Environmentalists say research shows emissions of methane, a gas that is about 80 times more potent for warming than CO2 over a 20-year period, don’t diminish as a well’s production declines. Supporters of the methane fee say companies should be able to operate without gratuitously damaging the environment.
“These are inexpensive rules,” said David Doniger, a senior attorney handling climate issues for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
While Trump is happy — elated even — with the low prices at the pump, his friends and allies in the oil business are not. But they don’t blame him.
Industry leaders grimaced during last year’s campaign when he pledged to cut gasoline prices.
But Trump’s “drill, baby, drill!” exhortations and record-setting oil production in the United States aren’t the main drivers of a lower global price for oil.
Instead, analysts point in part to a drive to regain market share by the group of producing countries known as OPEC+.
Trump is still taking credit for it, though, and says he’d like drive the price down even lower. He talked during last year’s campaign, and earlier this month, about gasoline falling below $2.50 per gallon.
“He wants to get it down to $2,” Montalban said. “God help us.”
