This story is part of a Grist package examining how President Trump’s first 100 days in office have reshaped climate and environmental policy in the U.S.
President Donald Trump came into office promising to “drill, baby, drill” and, on day one, signed an executive order aimed at “Unleashing American Energy.” On Friday, just over 100 days later, oil companies released their first quarterly earnings reports of Trump’s second term. They weren’t pretty.
The two largest oil companies in the United States saw revenues tumble. Earnings at Exxon Mobil fell 6 percent compared to last year, to $7.7 billion. Chevron’s first-quarter income dropped more than a third, to $3.5 billion. “We are seeing significant downward pressure on prices and margins,” Darren Woods, chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said during a call with analysts on Friday. “In this environment, it is more important than ever to focus on what we can control.”
This caps a three month stretch — and the first 100 days of an administration — that saw oil executives swooning at the possibility of a boon. But since President Trump has taken office, headwinds have mounted.
The price of a barrel of oil has fallen from almost $80 to about $60 since his inauguration, sweeping new tariffs have made things like steel costlier, and economic uncertainty has made planning considerably more challenging. According to Baker Hughes, an oil field service provider, the number of drilling rigs in the nation’s largest oil field, the Permian Basin, have fallen about 3 percent over the last month.
“There seems to be a lack of continuity in the policymaking that affects that industry,” said Sanjay Srinivasan, a professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State University.
On the one hand, President Trump declared a national energy emergency within hours of taking office and has been pushing for an expansion of fossil fuel extraction. The Department of Interior, for example, announced plans to open more tracts of public land to drilling, including in the Arctic. It also moved to shorten the permitting process for projects from as long as two years to 28 days.
“They are fast-tracking dangerous, disastrous projects that are going to put the health and safety of people, the water, and the environment at risk,” said Jasmine Vazin, Deputy Director of the Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign at the Sierra Club, pointing to the Line 5 pipeline in Michigan as one example. “This is what [oil companies] wanted.”
At the same time, the president has called for oil prices of $50 a barrel, which would decimate the industry. “At $50-per-barrel oil, we will see U.S. oil production start to decline immediately and likely significantly,” one anonymous executive responded in a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. “There cannot be ‘U.S. energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.” Others reported already cutting future capital expenditures based on the administration’s ambitions.
Trump’s tariffs have also taken a toll on oil companies by raising the cost of the steel they rely on for wells and other equipment, as well as, likely slowing global demand for oil, which generally drops along with economic activity. Foreign producers deciding to increase output, including an OPEC+ announcement last week to boost its supply by more than 400,000 barrels a day in June, has only compounded domestic pressures.
“I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” said one executive in the Federal Reserve survey. Another added: “Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal. We want more stability.”
Whether the Trump administration can bring that stability remains an open question. Even if it does, there’s no guarantee that American oil output — which was already at record levels before Trump took office — can grow significantly, or that it will create more jobs. It’s also unclear if Trump cares.
“I’ll get those guys drilling,” he told supporters in Greenville, North Carolina, in November. “If they drill themselves out of business, I don’t give a damn.”
So far, that seems to be the trajectory. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that American oil-and-gas companies lost more than $280 billion in stock-market value between April 2, when Trump unveiled his tariff blitz, and Monday.
That drop outpaced that of every other major sector.
