Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a news conference at Trump Tower, Friday, May 31, 2024, in New York.
At the Houston fundraiser, Trump also gave a speech in which he vowed to immediately approve oil pipelines and expand oil drilling in a second term, as The Post has reported. If approved, the CrownRock takeover would make Occidental a bigger player in U.S. shale than Chevron and Hess combined. The deal would boost Occidental’s production in the Permian Basin — a major oil field that covers West Texas and Southeast New Mexico — by 170,000 barrels of oil and gas per day. The FTC has sought to determine whether the merger violates antitrust regulations.
“It’s a new era of the shale industry. We’ve been calling it Shale 4.0,” said Matthew Bernstein, a senior analyst and manager of shale analytics at Rystad Energy. “Perhaps there has been a higher degree of FTC scrutiny, given the pace and the size of these deals.” Phones were taken before attendees entered the smaller room. A few other elected officials also attended the event, but it was mainly oil executives, according to people with knowledge of the matter.