| Greetings, Utah Energy United! We’ll admit we didn’t have this one on our bingo card: President Trump claiming “big oil” is gouging consumers and urging the Department of Justice to look into it. Screengrab of his original post below. |
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| In this business, you truly never know what awaits. As we head into the weekend of July 4, and in stark contrast to this language from the President, a recent article from the Midland Reporter-Telegram noted the following: “The 2026 Iran war has raised the question of how exposed the U.S. economy is to geopolitical oil supply disruptions,” Dallas Fed researchers Lutz Kilian, Michael Plante and Alexander W. Richter write in their report and accompanying working paper. “It is widely believed that the U.S. economy has become less vulnerable to such disruptions, as it has reduced its dependence on oil and changed from a major net oil importer to a net oil exporter.” The researchers found the response of U.S. real gross domestic product growth to the 2026 shock is only one-twentieth of what it would have been in 1980 and only one-sixth of that seen in the rest of the world. It’s this time each year that we pause to express gratitude for living and working in a country with a robust oil and gas industry. This is our business, true. But the benefits of a healthy and prosperous domestic oil and natural gas industry provide countless benefits, some that are harder to quantify, and many that are quite easy. In the case of the ongoing strife around the Strait of Hormuz, the analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas puts some of those benefits in clear black and white: Key findings from the new research include the following: –The model outlined in the report shows the Iran war has reduced annualized U.S. real GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points. –Such a disruption in 1980 would have caused annualized U.S. real GDP growth to decline by 5.6 percentage points, about 20 times the decline in 2026, according to the Dallas Fed model. –The decline in vulnerability is driven by the U.S. economy’s reduced dependence on oil — expenditures as a share of GDP declined from a high near 8% in 1980 to 3% in 2024 — and its shift from being a net oil importer to a net oil exporter in late 2019. –A global oil supply disruption of 15% today causes a decline in annualized real GDP growth of 1.7 percentage points in the rest of the world, compared with 0.3 percentage points in the U.S., according to the report. It’s our privilege to represent Utah’s oil and natural gas industry, and we appreciate everything that you do for our state, for our country, and for our world. Thank you for your continued engagement with Utah Energy United. Happy Friday! And Happy Independence Day! Be sure to follow us on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And if you know someone who should be a part of Utah Energy United, get them to sign up here. Rikki Hrenko-Browning President Utah Petroleum Association 6905 S. 1300 E. #288 Cottonwood Heights, UT 84047 (435) 219-0963 rhrenko-browning@utahpetroleum.org  |
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