CERAWEEK: US energy dominance council to cut oil industry costs by finding redundancies: Burgum

The US National Energy Dominance Council will be able to reduce oil industry costs by first prioritizing major energy projects and then weeding out regulatory redundancies and overreach, US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said March 12.

Burgum, who is chairing the council, said the process could reduce costs by 10%.

"I think there you can easily get rid of 20 or 30% of the regulation and just get back to the organizations and figure out who's the one person that says yes or no, right, as opposed to 13 [people]," Burgum said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston.

At current oil prices, "I think there's easily 10%" in savings," he said. "Let's call it $6 to $8 per barrel."

US President Donald Trump issued an executive order Feb. 14 creating the council, which is composed of an array of cabinet secretaries and other top agency energy-related leaders. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is the council's vice-chair.

"We're not doing studies," Burgum said, when asked how the council would work. "Think of us as a small tiger team of people with private sector experience. We will identify strategic projects that need to happen [and] then we'll go out and say 'What can we do to take a project that everybody says should take eight to 10 years, and how [do we] get it done in two to four years?'," he said.

"We will we will identify where the overlap is, we will identify where the overreach is, and by actually doing the work of getting projects built, then we're going to help solve the problem and identify what else we can just get rid of in the federal government," Burgum said.