What Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ fracking agenda could look like

President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was, in part, built on a bedrock of U.S. domestic oil and gas production.

Throughout the election cycle, Trump repeated his “drill, baby, drill” slogan, promising a fracking boom that he said could help make America more “energy independent” and lower voters’ spending at the gas station.

During his campaign speech at Madison Square Garden in October, Trump asserted his oil and gas policy would “cut your energy prices in half,” telling voters that within a year of his inauguration in January 2025, they’d see a 50% decrease in costs.

Time will tell what the Trump administration will accomplish, but experts say that within his first few months in office, Trump could dramatically tap into America’s drilling landscape.

ABC News has reached out to the Trump campaign for a comment.

“There’s a number of things that he can do within the first 90 days when he gets in office to really help bolster American energy,” Tim Tarpley, president of the Energy Workforce & Technology Council, told ABC News.

Tarpley oversees the national trade association that represents 220 energy service and technology companies and over 650,000 individuals in the U.S. energy workforce.

Increase fracking on federal land

Trump nominating fracking services executive Chris Wright to spearhead the Department of Energy signals an increase in domestic drilling during his term.

Wright founded the publicly traded oilfield services firm Liberty Energy in 2010, which fracks 20% of the onshore wells nationally.

The $3 billion company is involved in nearly 10% of the United States’ total energy production, according to Wright.

“Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy. He has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas,” Trump wrote in a statement announcing Wright as the nominee.

“Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics,” Trump added.

During an interview with Bloomberg in July, Wright suggested that the Trump administration would expand drilling on federal lands and make it easier to permit infrastructure.

Fracking accounts for the bulk of America’s domestic oil and gas production, with 95% of new wells being hydraulically fractured, creating two-thirds of the total U.S. gas market and about half of U.S. crude oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

Despite the back-and-forth between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on a so-called fracking ban during the election cycle, fracking wells in the U.S. are predominantly on private land, with federal land leases only accounting for 24% of the total number of wells, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Trump’s second term in the White House could see a shift in that percentage, with more permits being leased to federal land, Tarpley said, while noting that substantial changes “will not happen overnight.”

“Those numbers may increase, that perpetual share may increase slightly, but I don’t think there’s going to be a dramatic increase in fracking on federal lands in the near term,” he said.

Reform permitting processes

At the top of the to-do list, Tarpley said Trump will likely pass a bipartisan permitting reform bill introduced by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairmen Joe Manchin and John Barrasso in July.

Notably, independent Sen. Manchin and Republican Sen. Barrasso represent major energy-producing states, West Virginia and Wyoming.

The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 aims to “strengthen U.S. energy independence by accelerating the permitting process for critical energy and mineral projects,” according to the bill.

The legislation slashes the amount of time allotted to energy projects to undergo judicial review. Specifically, it recommends reducing the deadline for filing lawsuits against an agency that has approved or denied a permit from six years to just 150 days.

The bill also requires courts to prioritize cases reviewing an agency permitting decision for oil and gas projects — essentially moving oil and gas cases up the docket.

Tarpley believes the passing of this legislation, which will likely be possible with the GOP-controlled Senate, will make America more competitive in the global energy market.

“Currently, it takes about five years to get a permit for a gas pipeline from initial design to construction to done,” Tarpley said. “That’s well longer than most of our peers around the world.”

Environmental and health effects

Environmental organizations have decried the Energy Permitting Reform Act. In July, more than 360 environmental organizations shared a joint letter to the Senate committee urging them to reject what they called a “dirty permitting deal.”

The organizations, led by the nonprofit Earth Justice, called the legislation, “an egregious attempt to fulfill the wish list of the fossil fuel industry, which is laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, under the guise of promoting renewable energy and developing transmission infrastructure.”

Organizations fear that the bill and its proposed limitations on the judicial review process will lead to more leasing and drilling without federal oversight and community input.

The National Institutes of Health warns of the impacts of increased fracking, saying chemicals used in the process could lead to air and water contamination, harming human health and the environment.

A 2022 study published in the National Library of Medicine found that air pollutants from fracking sites is associated with multiple cancers and increased health risk.

“The researchers found that older adults who lived near or downwind of unconventional oil and gas development sites had a higher risk of premature death than those living upwind,” the NIH reported.

Similarly, the Environmental Protection Agency found scientific evidence that hydraulic fracking activities can affect drinking water resources under some circumstances, but the extent of contamination is unknown.

Still, Trump’s vocal support for domestic oil production is something he said could be on the “Day 1” agenda.

During a campaign stop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in October, Trump said, “On Day 1, frack, frack, frack, and drill, drill, drill.”

“We will have energy independence and energy dominance,” he added.