US ELECTIONS: Experts see renewables boon, oil and gas headwinds in Biden win

If Joe Biden wins the White House in November the US could see the largest public and private allocation of capital to renewable energy resources in history along with environmental regulatory rollback reversal that could impact the oil and gas industry, experts said Sept. 8.

If President Trump were to lose the upcoming US presidential election, the country would experience the "complete opposite of what we have today in almost every respect in the energy industry," Charles Myers, founder and chairman of political consulting firm Signum Global, said during a web-based discussion hosted by the New York Energy Forum.

Biden has proposed the largest infrastructure package in modern history, which includes the largest allocation to renewable energy resources in history, Myers said.

And while the fossil fuel industry would not go away under a Biden administration, renewable energy is a "huge priority for Biden," he said.

David Flaherty, CEO and founder of Magellan Strategies, said Biden's energy policies could be characterized by "restrictive and unduly burdensome regulations on the oil and gas industry" through agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management and US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Flaherty has spent the last 28 years working with state and national Republican candidates, conservative organizations, and many ballot initiative and referendum campaigns.

Rolling back environmental rollbacks

Specifically, Biden's administration would likely roll back deregulation initiatives put in place by the Trump administration with regulations focused on hydraulic fracturing, air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, endangered species and waters of the US, he said.

Air, water and wildlife regulations "will be a particular focus because the governing federal statutes reach to oil and gas activities on private lands not just federally owned lands," Flaherty said.

However, with Biden employing a more centrist approach than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, both presenters agreed that a national fracking ban would be unlikely.

Additionally, Flaherty pointed out that Biden as president could potentially declare a national emergency to address climate change, as President Trump did with border security.

A Biden administration would likely roll back the Trump administration's environmental deregulation in the first 100 days and Flaherty assumes that would happen regardless of whether Democrats win control of the Senate.

However, both presenters said current polling and predictions show Democrats sweeping the White House and both houses of Congress.

Myers also said Biden could seek to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran similar to the one agreed under President Obama through which Iran agreed to cut its nuclear weapons program in exchange for relaxed oil industry sanctions.

But that could produce a real possibility of having Iran come back as a global oil supplier "at the worst time" for the industry because it would add more barrels to an already oversupplied market, Myers said.

A new cabinet-level position of "climate czar" could also be created in a Biden White House, with Tom Steyer mentioned as a candidate for that position. And while such a role might not ultimately go to Steyer, clean energy would be a government-wide initiative under Biden, Myers said.

Steyer is a billionaire investor who now focuses on environmental activism and who briefly ran for president earlier in this election.