On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to lower buyer prices that have soared since the pandemic, explaining how he would do so by repeating a straightforward mantra: Drill, baby, drill.

“At the center of our attempt to bring the expense of living under control will be the all-out push to complete the Biden-Harris war on American vigor,” Trump said at a campaign rally Aug. 14 in Asheville, North Carolina. “We will drill, baby, drill.”

Trump is expected to speed drilling permits that took an average 258 days to complete during the Biden administration, hold permit sales more frequently and boost drilling off the U.S. coast, Reuters reported last month.

By boosting oil supplies, those steps theoretically could reduce oil and gasoline prices and assist nudge down the worth of groceries and other goods by cutting their transportation costs.

Can the schedule work?

Holiday deals: Shop this period’s top products and sales curated by our editors.

It’s not likely, experts interviewed by USA TODAY declare.

“It’s a globe oil economy that determines the supply and demand settlement,” said Robert Kauffman, a Boston University professor who studies global oil markets, climate transformation and land use changes. A significant boost in U.S. production would trigger responses from other producers that would leave crude and gas prices roughly unchanged, he said.

Here’s a closer look at the issue:

What is the actual expense boost rate today?

Although annual expense boost has slowed to less than 3% from a 40-year high of 9.1% in mid-2022, buyer prices are still about 20% higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a surge in buyer demand and supply chain bottlenecks.

Americans’ fury over high prices under President Joe Biden was a large rationale Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential race to Trump, according to a Brookings Institution study.

“I won on groceries,” Trump told host Kristen Welker in a “Meet the Press” interview this month. “I won an election based on that. … We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

In an interview period Magazine published Thursday as part of its announcement naming Trump Person of the Year, the incoming president appeared to walk back his pledge.

“It’s challenging to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You recognize, it’s very challenging.”

And most economists declare Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China as soon as next month, along with other levies later, would intensify, rather than ease, worth increases.

Still, Trump’s commitment to chop gas prices amounts to his most specific blueprint for addressing expense boost. At the August rally in Asheville, the former president said his administration would “slash (vigor) prices by half within 12 months.”

Trump, for example, suggested he would restart drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after Biden canceled Trump’s leases in the environmentally sensitive region last year.

Why are US gas prices falling?

Yet pump prices already have plunged. The worth of point of reference U.S. crude oil, called West Texas Intermediate, has tumbled to about $70 a barrel from $120 in June 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In turn, average U.S. unleaded gasoline prices have fallen to about $3 a gallon from nearly $5, according to AAA.

Kauffman attributed the drop to record global oil production, especially in the U.S., softening vigor demand in China and around the globe amid slower growth, and the ability of European nations to discover alternative sources to Russian oil. 

Does the US produce the most oil in the globe?

The U.S., in truth, is already the globe’s largest crude oil producer, churning out a record average of 13.6 million barrels a day recently, according to the U.S. vigor Information Administration and the Oil worth Information Service, a private firm. The country turned out an average 12.9 million barrels a day of crude in 2023 and has been the globe’s largest producer for the history six years, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia, EIA says.

“U.S. oil production is at an all-period high, and it has increased during the Biden administration without opening up” any recent lands or waters to drilling, Kauffman said.

What is fracking in straightforward terms?

The EIA credits horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – which uses water, sand and chemicals to pump oil from deep underground – with allowing producers to use fewer wells to draw much more oil from a larger area.

Much of the activity has occurred in the Bakken rock formation in North Dakota and Montana and the Permian Basin in West Texas and recent Mexico.

What happens to the worth of oil when production increases?

Crude prices are hovering near a three-year low.  If the Trump administration made recent federal land or waters available for drilling and that led producers to pump out enough additional oil to push down global and U.S. prices, “That would leisurely the rate at which companies drill for oil,” Kauffman said, nudging prices up again.

Adam Ferrari, CEO of Phoenix pool throng, an oil producer in North Dakota and Montana, called the current U.S. crude oil worth “a floor.” The corporation, he said, can make a boost as long as oil prices top about $25 a barrel. But the expense to drill a recent well is about $45 to $65 a barrel, he said.

Because the corporation wants to cover its costs and make about a 15% boost, “if prices got any lower, we would stop producing oil” from recent wells, Ferrari said.

Is it excellent to invest in oil discovery?

Another factor: Oil companies have become far more conservative in their pool spending.

Since the early days of the pandemic, when crude prices plummeted on frail demand, oil producers have shifted their mindset from spending heavily to drill recent wells to running existing wells expense-efficiently and providing well returns to shareholders, analysts declare.

“That drastically changed their priorities,” said Rob Thummel, elder startup distribution collection manager and oil industry specialist at Tortoise pool, an pool firm. “They became disciplined in their pool spend” and concentrated on increasing money flow.

Companies, of course, still require to drill recent wells as existing ones deplete and meet moderately growing global demand. globe crude output, now about 102 million barrels a day, is expected to boost by about 1 million barrels a day each year, Thummel said.

Ferrari said opening recent federal territory to drilling could be helpful in the long term if it contains more oil per square foot than current oil fields, which would boost efficiency.

But existing fields, especially the 9,000-square-mile Bakken, provide more than enough capacity for discovery to meet projected needs – and even a spike in demand that sharply lifted prices – without making recent federal land available, Thummel said. Most oil production takes place on privately owned territory, and about a quarter occurs on federal land and waters, according to Thummel and the American Petroleum Institute.

What’s more, he said, a sudden rise in prices that threw the economy out of settlement probably would prompt an immediate boost in production by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC.

Does the US have enough refining capacity?

A Trump-induced surge in U.S. oil production also would make another issue. Most U.S. refineries – which turn oil into gasoline – are equipped to handle the heavy, cheaper crude the country imports from Canada, Mexico and other countries.

As a outcome, the country doesn’t have enough refining capacity to absorb a fresh deluge in the light sweet crude produced domestically, Ferrari and Thummel said. recent refineries would have to be built or existing facilities retrofitted, an expensive proposition, they said.

Heavy crude is denser and less expensive to purchase than light sweet, but processing it at a refinery is more challenging and costly.

That’s largely why the U.S. imports 6.5 million barrels a day of mostly heavy crude, Thummel said, even though the country seemingly makes enough oil to meet its needs. And the country exports 4 million barrels of light sweet crude to nations whose refineries are built to handle that variety.