Trump can’t ‘drill, baby, drill’ his way out of this Iran oil crisis

President Donald Trump promised to “drill, baby, drill” on the presidential campaign trail.

It’s not going to bail him out of this oil crisis spurred by the war he started in Iran.

Trump and Republicans last year aggressively ramped up policies favorable to fossil fuels after romping to an electoral victory in 2024 on a promise to lower the cost of living, including by quelling gas prices.

Their signature domestic policy bill, known as the “one big beautiful” tax and spending measure, opened up swaths of new land to oil and gas leasing. The administration has moved to slash regulations that the fossil fuel industry views as hurdles. And it has pursued an aggressive leasing schedule to get more rigs operating on federal lands and waters.

Now, Trump is confronted with a crisis there’s little chance of drilling his way out of. The war in Iran has whipsawed oil markets as the Strait of Hormuz has remained largely impassible. The strait carries about 20% of the world’s oil supply. And the U.S. is unlikely to rapidly ramp up drilling to fill the void, analysts and lawmakers say.

“No, the quantity is not there,” Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said. “I don’t care what you do with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or drilling, you can’t make up that kind of quantity.”

“You’re still going to see a big impact on gas prices no matter what. … The tail of how long it’s going to take to get back to normal is going to be many months,” Heinrich said in an interview.

The phrase “drill, baby, drill” was popularized in 2008 by Sarah Palin, the vice presidential candidate on John McCain’s Republican ticket. In the nearly two decades since, it’s been a Republican rallying cry, and Trump used it at his rallies in the 2024 presidential campaign.

The U.S. currently produces about 13.7 million barrels of oil per day, according to December data from the Energy Information Administration. Last week, the U.S. refined about 16 million barrels of oil per day.

Oil is also beholden to global market conditions, which is why the Strait of Hormuz closure has been so disruptive. The strait carries about 20% of the world’s oil, and the world demands more than 100 million barrels per day.

“What matters is the overall supply and demand, and with what’s going on in the Middle East right now, that is going to be out of balance for a very substantial amount of time,” Heinrich said.

Analysts agree. Brian Prest, an economist and fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research group that focuses on natural resources, said domestically drilling the volume of oil necessary to offset the Strait of Hormuz shutdown is likely unfeasible. That’s despite sky-high U.S. production for the last several years.

“You would need to see huge increases in U.S. production to actually manifest as meaningful percentages of total global supply,” Prest said. “The U.S. has seen a huge run-up in the past 15 years in oil production, but that’s exactly what it is; it took 15 years.”

“I can’t imagine that you are going to see huge surges from the U.S. alone that are going to balance the market over the course of a war that they’re hoping is going to last a few weeks,” Prest said. The war reaches its two-week mark on Saturday.

There are also signs that U.S. oil producers aren’t planning to rapidly increase their production of oil and gas to take advantage of sky-high prices. At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil prices skyrocketed. And while the U.S. rig count did increase modestly to reflect the price jump, U.S. total crude oil production maintained what has been a steady march upward since 2010.

Much of that increase has been driven by technological advances in drilling, particularly in horizontal drilling and fracking, that has greatly increased output in places like the Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas — not a fire sale of new prospective drilling.

Even Republicans, who have spent the better part of Trump’s second term touting “energy dominance” and “energy independence,” acknowledge that drilling more is not going to get the U.S. out of the oil crisis in the short term.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said the increased oil and gas drilling that the Trump administration is trying to propagate will bring prices down in the long run, but opening the Strait of Hormuz is the priority to get prices down now.

“The key in the near term will be kind of how this dynamic works on the Strait of Hormuz,” he said in an interview. “If that gets covered pretty well, then even if there’s a perception this drags on a little longer, it’s mitigated.”

“In the long term, because we continue to grow … and we keep growing that number over time, that’ll actually bring the oil markets down, prices cheaper, and make us even less reliant on the Middle East,” Hoeven said. “But that’s a longer term.”

So far, the strait remains effectively closed, despite the Trump administration trying to find a way for vessels to pass through it. And oil markets, despite dipping for a brief period this week when Trump suggested the war may be over soon, continue to march higher.

U.S. oil futures closed at more than $95 on Thursday. And Brent, the global index, tipped over $100 as Iran’s new supreme leader said the Strait of Hormuz must remain closed.