Big Oil’s Plan for GOP Control

Internal documents from AXPC, a powerful fossil fuel trade group, lay out its strategy for demolishing climate policy and boosting oil & gas production under Trump 2.0

This article was produced in partnership with HEATED, a must-read for anyone who cares about holding polluters accountable.

This past August, some of the country’s most powerful oil and gas executives gathered at a swanky Houston hotel to discuss what they would do if their well-financed efforts to secure Republican control of Washington succeeded.

Fieldnotes obtained internal documents revealing the details of that closed-door meeting, which were reported on by the Washington Post last month. But now that Republicans will indeed control not just the presidency, but both chambers of Congress, it’s worth revisiting the oil and gas industry’s strategy to dismantle climate policy and boost fossil fuel production over the next four years.

The strategy is laid out in the “2025 Policy Roadmap,” a plan drawn up by the American Exploration & Production Council, or AXPC. AXPC is a trade organization made up of ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy, ConocoPhillips, and more than two dozen other oil and gas corporations. Each of these companies pays the group a quarter-million dollars a year to lobby on their behalf.

Taken together, the ideas outlined in AXPC’s roadmap would obliterate some of the government’s most powerful levers for tackling the climate crisis and protecting public health. And given AXPC’s ties to the MAGA movement, there’s good reason to believe its member corporations will get most if not all of what they want from Trump and his congressional allies.

Here’s a closer look at what AXPC and its members have planned for Trump 2.0.

Killing a powerful market tool to reduce methane

Earlier this month, EPA finalized a fee on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The fee, mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act, is the first direct charge that the federal government has ever imposed on greenhouse gas emissions. Some oil and gas corporations will soon have to pay $900 for every metric ton of methane they release, and the rate will increase to $1,500 in years to come. This creates a financial penalty on industry if it doesn’t stop emitting methane—a powerful heat-trapping gas responsible for about 30% of global warming.

AXPC really wants to kill the methane fee. In a slide presented to the board in August, the fee, also known as the waste emissions charge, ranks among the fastest moving, highest priority issues.

AXPC’s roadmap includes a recommendation to repeal the penalty. The most straightforward way to roll back the fee is for Republicans to revoke it through reconciliation, which allows Congress to bypass filibuster rules to pass budget-related measures.

AXPC is currently pressing Republicans to make that happen. Another slide presented to the board reads: “What we are doing now: Advocating with R’s for inclusion in reconciliation.” The lobbying group has influenced legislation before; it claims credit for securing a policy rider on a July appropriations bill passed by the House that sought to block the fee’s implementation.

Eliminating the methane fee would be a huge blow to the U.S.’s efforts to address climate change. EPA estimates that the fee will reduce methane emissions by 1.2 million metric tons through 2035, which is equivalent to removing nearly 8 million gas cars from the road for a year. Killing the fee would also harm public health. In addition to warming the planet, methane reacts with other gasses in the atmosphere to form smog, which causes around a million premature deaths each year.

Bringing back huge tax breaks for oil & gas drillers

For more than a century, the fossil fuel industry has benefited from a tax carveout available only to oil and gas corporations that allows them to write off approximately 85% of the cost of drilling new wells. But in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act changed how these deductions, known as intangible drilling costs, or IDCs, work.

Now, industry can no longer immediately deduct IDCs when calculating its taxable income, which means it can no longer recoup well drilling costs in the form of tax breaks right off the bat. This has caused considerable angst.

In 2025, parts of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will expire, teeing up what Axios is predicting will be a “battle royale over tax policy.” Oil and gas corporations will be in the fray, and according to internal AXPC materials, “fixing the current tax treatment of IDCs is a consensus priority.”

AXPC sees two ways to achieve its preferred outcome: Congress could pass legislation narrowly targeting IDCs, or it could repeal the corporate alternative minimum tax entirely.

The lobbying group has close ties with two lawmakers who have already introduced a bill narrowly targeting IDCs. AXPC's PAC maxed out its campaign contributions to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and nearly maxed out its contributions to Rep. Mike Carey (R-Ohio), and the group hosted events for both sponsors in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

AXPC has also been laying the foundation in other ways. In July, AXPC member Ascent Resources hosted a roundtable for the GOP working group considering oil and gas tax provisions, led by Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.). After the event, Miller put out a press release parroting industry’s talking points: “We must also protect intangible drilling costs and percentage depletion to create more opportunities to drill for oil and gas in the United States…”

With Republicans in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, AXPC now plans to “move [the IDC] fix through reconciliation.”

Granting industry’s wishes on IDCs would restore a massive tax break that exclusively benefits corporate oil and gas interests. Further subsidizing polluters allows them to rake in even higher profits as they wreck the climate.

Gutting environmental review for fossil fuel projects

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is a bedrock environmental law that requires agencies to consider environmental impacts before making major decisions, like granting permits. In recent years, the Biden administration has issued related rules requiring agencies to consider climate change and environmental justice impacts, too.

For decades, oil and gas corporations have chafed at NEPA requirements. Now, with Republicans and Democrats on the Hill both talking about permit reform, the industry sees an opportunity to gut the law.

According to the internal materials, AXPC’s “key permitting priority” is “creating a standard of judicial review for claims brought under the National Environmental Policy Act,” which would limit which agency decisions environmental groups can challenge in court.

AXPC is trying to limit the law in other ways, too, like by pushing a permitting reform bill introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) that would shorten litigation windows and accelerate permitting decision timelines. The internal materials show that AXPC lobbied both Barrasso and Manchin on the legislation.

AXPC’s 2025 Policy Roadmap also includes a slew of recommendations to weaken NEPA, like jettisoning the Biden-era directives to consider climate change and environmental justice in permitting decisions.

A recent court decision, which is likely to be appealed and could eventually make it to the Supreme Court, has thrown into question how the federal government will interpret NEPA. But regardless of the outcome, the oil and gas industry plans to continue its campaign to defang the law.

Establishing a narrow standard of judicial review and putting unreasonable constraints on NEPA would likely mean environmental groups would win fewer legal challenges against oil and gas projects, like pipelines. Building more fossil fuel infrastructure would lock us into higher emissions in the future.

How likely is all this to happen?

AXPC and the oil and gas corporations it represents shouldn’t have any trouble gaining an audience with the Trump administration or with Republicans in Congress after cultivating close relationships with the MAGA movement.

Several board members, for instance, were on the attendee list for the Mar-a-Lago dinner this spring where Trump made his quid pro quo-themed promise to gut climate regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations. Another AXPC member executive, Hilcorp Energy founder Jeff Hildebrand, held multiple fundraisers for the president-elect and, along with his wife, contributed more than $3 million to Republicans last election. Meanwhile, AXPC spent more than a half-million dollars to help the GOP win Senate seats in Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania.

AXPC has enough political gravity that it was able to attract soon-to-be VP JD Vance and future Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to its events over the summer. And the group also appears to have made inroads with the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank at the center of planning for Trump’s second term. Slides prepared for an earlier AXPC board meeting in April list an op-ed penned by an AFPI director bashing the methane fee as one of AXPC’s accomplishments.

But the Trump trifecta the oil and gas sector was gunning for also brings new risks. If “moderation dissolves,” as AXPC fears it will, industry could be “caught in the middle” between overzealous Republicans and their investors. Many in the GOP want to take a wrecking ball to climate regulations, but investors would prefer they leave some in place—albeit without any teeth—so that corporations can sell LNG to the EU under the region’s new methane rules. Similarly, “overly biased” permitting decisions could leave oil and gas projects vulnerable to litigation. Or in perhaps the most interesting—and for some, most hopeful—finding from the internal documents, AXPC sees “populist pushback” as a wildcard that could one day stand in its way.