[Obama debate quote] “Here’s what happened. You had a whole bunch of oil companies who had leases on public lands that they weren’t using. So what we said was you can’t just sit on this for 10, 20, 30 years, decide when you want to drill, when you want to produce, when it’s most profitable for you. These are public lands. So if you want to drill on public lands, you use it or you lose it. And so what we did was take away those leases. And we are now reletting them so that we can actually make a profit.”
Really? Did the government tear up leases that oil companies had paid billions of dollars for and throw the property back on the market?
The simple answer is no. I’m not sure what Obama was exactly referring to, but his administration has repeatedly accused oil companies of sitting on leases and failing to produce oil and gas from them. It’s a charge that drives the oil industry nuts, since it makes little economic sense to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions to purchase a lease and then sit on it for no reason. It takes years and a lot of expensive seismic work and exploratory drilling to determine whether an oil deposit has economic value, and the oil industry isn’t in the business of drilling dry holes for the fun of it. If there are delays, industry executives say, it’s because of governmental policy such as the offshore drilling ban Obama issued after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
“It’s like you rent an apartment for $20 million and the landlord refuses to give you the keys to it,” said Erik Milito, director of exploration and production at the American Petroleum Institute. “Then he turns around and complains about it.”.....
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/10/17/did-obama-really-take-away-those-oil-leases/