He served in an Obama administration that oversaw a historic surge in American oil and gas production, as shale went mainstream. Tens of thousands of wells were drilled and energy-bearing rocks fractured from North Dakota to Texas. And the industry cheered when the government he was part of lifted a ban on crude exports in 2015.

Yet, Joe Biden—armed with a commanding lead in the polls ahead of November’s U.S. presidential election—now promises a root-and-branch overhaul of the American energy system that will put climate change at its heart and which one worried industry adviser describes as “a Tet offensive” on the fossil fuels industry.

The plan, which aired again at the Democratic party convention last week, earmarks $2 trillion in spending over the next four years to use climate policy to drag the economy out of its pandemic-era recession. But Biden’s plans for the energy sector would reach into everything from Middle East geopolitics to the global race with China over clean tech and is likely to prove unpopular among parts of the U.S. electorate—dependent on oil and gas for jobs—in an election year.

It stems from an urgency about climate change that has animated much of his party—especially the younger supporters he will need to mobilise. And is made possible by a coming together of factors: drastic falls in clean-energy costs, rapid technological progress, and the devastation of the pandemic, which makes even a $2 trillion plan seem politically viable.

“Biden did gain key climate and clean energy provisions in the 2009 stimulus [during the financial crisis]," says Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser. “But he also recognises that climate has emerged over the past decade as a premier issue of global security and foreign policy, and is now suddenly a crucial element in America’s green recovery from the COVID crisis, as well.”

Biden said in July that he would not “tinker around the edges” with his plan. “We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity.”

It means energy will be pivotal to November’s election—and the election pivotal to the future of the energy industry, with huge domestic and international implications.

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The outcome appears binary. On one hand is the status quo of Donald Trump—who, as president, has proclaimed an era of American “energy dominance,” torn up rules hindering drilling, weakened environmental oversight, and taken advantage of the U.S.’s reduced dependence on foreign supplies to impose sanctions on oil exporters from Venezuela to Iran. On the other, the green revolution proposed by Biden, who has also committed to rejoining both the Iranian nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord—multilateral agreements that Trump withdrew from, claiming they were bad for the U.S.

“The plan is very bold,” says Leah Stokes, an expert on climate policy and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There is no [U.S.] state right now that has a target this ambitious.”

If elected, Biden is promising net-zero emissions by 2050 and to electrify the U.S.’s transportation sector, installing a vast network of new car charging points, upgrading the grid and deploying utility-scale battery storage across the U.S.

Critics say it will destroy the country’s world-beating oil and gas industry—a claim that has forced Biden supporters in shale heartlands to insist local economies will be secured. The plan, they say, will resurrect American manufacturing and the country’s leadership—and, by including elements of the Green New Deal supported by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, satisfies the Democratic party’s leftwing without scaring its middle.

The language of the climate plan—devised by Stef Feldman, a Biden policy adviser, but with input, say people familiar with it, from a range of experts—tries to ease those tensions, with the creation of “millions of jobs” as frequent a motif as climate.

Congressional support for Biden’s energy vision will also be critical to its progress. Even if the Democrats win control of the Senate, this is not guaranteed. If they don’t, Republicans would mount stiff opposition.

“It’s hard to overstate how far Joe Biden’s Democratic party has shifted on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, in just four years,” says Bob McNally, a former adviser in the George W Bush White House and now head of Rapidan Energy Group. “A Biden victory would unleash a Tet offensive against the US oil and gas sector.”

‘Technically, financially do-able’

The most significant pledge is to “decarbonize” the U.S. electricity sector by 2035. Power generation accounted for about a third of U.S. energy-related emissions last year and offers the best chance for fast and deep cuts. And, claims the Biden camp, “the biggest job creation and economic opportunity engine of the 21st century.”

It is certainly ambitious. The plan pledges the installation of tens of thousands of wind turbines, millions of solar panels and a doubling of offshore wind by 2030. It is similarly aspirational—and vague—on other technologies analysts think will be essential in any shift to clean electricity. Carbon-free hydrogen fuel, advanced nuclear reactors, and grid-scale storage “at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries” are envisaged. None yet exists at the necessary scale.

Despite its thin details, the plunge in the costs of renewable energy makes the plan plausible, say clean-energy advocates. Installations of everything from rooftop solar to onshore wind turbines are happening faster than expected just a few years ago. Spending on U.S. offshore wind capacity may even get close to matching that of offshore drilling in the next decade, believes Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy. The market’s shift to more clean energy is why the US Energy Information Administration forecasts a doubling of renewables’ share of power generation by 2050.

That would still leave natural gas and coal generating almost half of all power in the U.S. But supporters of a transition say that, with a push of the kind Biden is proposing, fossil fuel reliance can be almost entirely eradicated. A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley concluded that, with “strong policy changes” U.S. power generation could be 90% carbon-free by 2035 without raising consumer bills or needing new fossil fuel plants. It would cost $1.7 trillion but save $1.2 trillion in environmental and health costs by 2050, the study calculated.

“Technically, financially, it is all do-able,” says Stokes, referring to Biden’s plan. If the full decarbonization is not quite reached by 2035, the extra 10% could come later, she says. “In 15 years there will be additional solutions to these problems.”

The main debate is around the role of natural gas. Ernest Moniz, U.S. secretary of energy between 2013 and 2017 when shale output soared, says the fossil fuel will still be needed, and so, therefore, will methods to contain its emissions.

Rising gas production in recent years helped cut U.S. emissions, as cheap supplies displaced much coal—which emits about twice as much CO₂ in combustion—in power generation. “There are [still] going to be some emissions,” says Moniz. “What we need to do is offset them with some negative carbon technologies.”

Near the top of his list is carbon capture and storage (CCS), an expensive system of sequestering CO₂, either permanently or for use elsewhere. This too requires huge scaling up. The U.S. has only 10 large-scale CCS plants, with capacity to capture just 25 million tonnes of CO₂ a year—a fraction of the 1.6 billion pumped out by the power sector.

The Biden camp has committed to research into CCS and says it would provide federal investments and enhanced tax incentives to “accelerate [its] development and deployment.”

It’s an area that industry appears to be engaging with. Dan Gabaldon, a partner at Roland Berger, a consultancy, says “relatively conservative independent power producers”, such as Vistra and Calpine, had become “much more bullish on CCS” than before. “Folks who were fighting it, or were very sceptical of it, are now beginning to embrace it.”

Political risk

Carbon capture could be politically useful for Biden, because it would preserve natural gas’s place in a decarbonised power sector. As long as natural gas has a role, so too will the practice that is critical to its production and supports so much employment in shale regions: fracking.

The Trump campaign believes fracking is a potential campaign weakness for Biden, claiming that tens of thousands of jobs are potentially at risk. In a speech in Ohio this month, where a drilling boom at the Utica shale gasfield has enriched the economy over recent years, the president said Biden would not just “hurt the bible [and] hurt God”, but was against “our kind of energy.”

Republican attack advertising in next-door Pennsylvania—another big shale gas producer and also a swing state—claims the former vice-president would ban fracking, scrapping 600,000 jobs.

Fact-checkers disagree. But Biden’s fracking problem is partly homemade. Pressed for his position in a CNN debate with Bernie Sanders this year, the former vice-president seemed clear: “No more. No new fracking.”

It was a head in the hands moment for a campaign that has worked hard to shore up Biden’s support in shale areas. The candidate has tried to be clearer since, saying recently that fracking was “not on the chopping block,” even though he would ban any new drilling on federal lands.

The ambiguity may be deliberate, as Biden seeks to keep anti-fossil fuel campaigners on the left of his party onside while seeking to blunt their movement’s capacity to frighten swing voters. The Biden campaign did not respond to requests for comment on his energy policy.

Polls show Biden is favorite to win the 20 electoral college votes up for grabs in Pennsylvania, which Hillary Clinton narrowly lost in 2016. But supporters in the state’s shale-rich areas, such as congressman Conor Lamb, are fighting to persuade voters that Biden remains the moderate who was part of the administration that oversaw the historic surge in oil and gas output.

“Some would try to portray the vice-president in the extremist camp of people like AOC,” says Rich Fitzgerald, a Democrat, and the top elected local official in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, whose constituents include many people employed in the shale gas business. “He’s not.”

Oil’s champion in the White House

That message may be getting through in Pennsylvania. But, elsewhere in the U.S. oil and gas sector, from operators to the Wall Street bankers that fund the industry, the mood is a mix of fear and resignation.

Biden need not announce a specific fracking ban to damage their industry, say fossil fuel executives—especially after the devastation brought by this year’s oil price crash. He could simply do so by reviving Obama-era environmental rules, curbing leakage of methane—a greenhouse gas more potent than CO₂—from pipelines and other facilities, cracking down on the burning-off of unused natural gas at wellheads, or by requiring public companies to disclose climate risks and emissions from their operations.

“If you’re an oil and gas guy and Biden wins you’ve got an awful lot to be worried about,” says Dan Eberhart, head of Canary, an oilfield services company, and Trump supporter. “It seems like his plan is to abandon Pennsylvania, Texas and oil and gas workers in favour of trying to make the environmentalists happy. There will be a semi-permanent cloud over the industry and that will crowd out investment.”

Industry insiders believe Trump is much more favourable to the oil industry. While the president pleaded with Saudi Arabia and Russia to end their price war and has spoken repeatedly about helping the battered shale sector, bailouts for fossil fuels or restoring crude output to the record level it struck this year would not feature high on Biden’s agenda.

“I don’t expect that it’s going to be a top priority to get back to 13 million barrels of oil production a day,” says Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute (API), one of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington.

Still, the API is sanguine about what a Biden presidency would mean for Big Oil. “I’ve met him, I’ve negotiated with him,” says Mr Sommers. “The view from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is different from behind a podium looking at a crowd on the campaign trail.”

Iranian oil

Two agreements ditched by Trump—that his Democratic challenger pledges immediately to rejoin—may exemplify the shift that would occur in American and global energy with a Biden election victory.

The first is the Iranian nuclear deal. Biden has said he would re-enter the treaty Trump walked away from in 2018, if Tehran complies with its terms. Assuming that those conditions are met, executive orders reinstating the U.S. in the deal and lifting the Trump administration’s sanctions on Iranian oil exports could be signed within days of Biden’s entry to the White House, according to people with knowledge of the process.

Iranian oil supply would rise sharply—to be met with production increases from its geopolitical rival, Saudi Arabia. This year’s historic OPEC cuts deal would unravel, say energy analysts, sparking another market crash of the kind that battered the U.S. shale sector this year.

Biden has also said he would rejoin the Paris climate agreement, committing once more to limits on emissions and representing a fundamental reversal in Washington’s approach. Trump’s years of promoting fossil fuels would yield to a focus on international co-operation and the battle against emissions.

“The U.S. consumes one-sixth of the world’s energy,” says Kevin Book, an analyst at Clearview Energy Partners, a Washington consultancy. “The election in 2020 could have a lot to do with how green the world is in 2030.”

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