(The Center Square) – A new report by the National Petroleum Council urges Congress to authorize a coordinated national program to map the country's resources deep underground as part of a broader effort to secure domestic supply chains for energy and critical minerals.
The study, requested by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, provides a sweeping blueprint that would transform data collected by state governments and federal agencies on what is below the earth’s surface into a digital national economic resource. The proposed National Cooperative Subsurface Assessment Program would span federal, Tribal, state, and private lands, both onshore and offshore.
The petroleum council’s recommendations include reviving the research, metallurgical, and processing capabilities of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, a federal agency closed since 1995. The plan also calls for a new funding framework that would encourage the exploration and production of geologic hydrogen, a zero-carbon gas trapped underground, recovering critical minerals from legacy coal byproducts and waste streams, and converting abandoned or orphaned oil wells into deep-earth geothermal laboratories.
Geological assessments of pore space suitable for carbon sequestration and of underground oil and gas reservoirs can be enhanced with advanced 3-D and 4-D mapping, the council’s report asserts.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said advanced subsurface mapping is essential to ensure the nation's sovereignty and future resource planning. "This is essentially the balance sheet, the assets we have in the United States, not just for economic reasons, but for national security reasons," Wright said Monday when the report was released. "What is the extent of the resources and assets we have? Where are they, where might they be?”
According to the report, resources below the earth’s surface currently provide more than 80% of the U.S. energy needs and are essential inputs in the manufacturing, infrastructure, and defense sectors. Extractive industries contributed roughly $384 billion, or about 1.2% of U.S. GDP, in 2025, according to the council’s report.
The council contends that valuable geological datasets are now fragmented, inconsistently preserved, or completely inaccessible across separate agencies, states, private industries, and academia. Without a modernized national program to centralize this data, the council asserts the U.S. risks duplicating corporate investments, data loss, and slower resource identification, potentially weakening American competitiveness in the global tech and industrial race.
Congress must formally vote to authorize and fund the council’s recommendations, including the proposed expenditures for geologic hydrogen exploration and the resurrection of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. Failing to enact this unified national approach, the council warns, will cause the U.S. to risk missing critical opportunities to realize the full economic and environmental value of its subsurface assets.
The National Petroleum Council, comprised of about 200 appointed members, is a federally chartered advisory committee established in 1946 that represents the oil and natural gas industry's views on policies considered by the U.S. government.
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