I support fast-tracked permitting. I’ve spent enough time in this industry to know what a multi-year federal review does to a project’s economics, to a landowner’s patience, and to a small operator’s ability to compete with companies that can afford to wait. On paper, FAST-41 — the federal permitting reform program that grew out of the 2015 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act — is exactly the kind of tool this industry has been asking Washington for since the Obama era.
But if I’m being straight with the readers of this publication, I think FAST-41 is on track to become a problem for oil and gas — not because it’s ineffective, but because of how it’s being used, and who it’s currently being used for.
Two companies. One region. One administration’s talking point.
As of this writing, the entire “Conventional Energy Production” sector of the current FAST-41 covered-projects portfolio consists of exactly two projects: the Black Bear Natural Gas Development project and the Piney Woods Development project. Both sit in San Augustine County, Texas, inside the Angelina National Forest. Both were added to the program within roughly the same window in late 2025.
Black Bear is sponsored by Revenant Energy Operating, LLC, a company built in partnership with Black Stone Minerals (NYSE: BSM) and backed by institutional investors and family offices. When the Permitting Council welcomed the project, its Executive Director framed it explicitly as advancing “the Trump Administration’s goal of unleashing the nation’s abundant energy resources.”
I don’t say any of that to suggest wrongdoing. I haven’t seen evidence of a backroom deal, and I’m not going to manufacture one. But I don’t need evidence of wrongdoing to tell you this looks bad. Two companies, tied to the same investor class, in the same county, riding the same administration’s messaging — that is not a broad industry win. That’s a narrow one. And “narrow win dressed up as industry-wide progress” is precisely the kind of story that gives critics of this industry an opening they don’t have to work very hard for.
The sector’s own history should worry you more than the headlines
Here’s what most people in the field don’t realize: oil and gas’s eligibility for FAST-41 — the Conventional Energy Production and Pipelines sectors — has been in the law since 2015, passed through normal legislative process. That’s the good version of this story, and it’s true.
What’s less clean is how the program has grown since. The Carbon Capture sector was added through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 — a year-end omnibus spending bill, the kind of legislation that gets voted on as a single package with essentially no individual floor debate on any one provision. The Mining sector wasn’t added by Congress at all; it was added by a vote of the Permitting Council itself, an appointed body. And the most recent expansion — bringing in critical minerals projects — happened through a March 2025 executive order, not a bill.
None of that is illegal. None of it is even unusual by Washington standards. But if you’re an independent operator or a supply chain business trying to explain to a skeptical public, a skeptical regulator, or a skeptical lender why this industry deserves faster permitting, “some of it happened by appropriations rider, some by agency vote, and some by executive order” is a much harder sentence to say out loud than “Congress voted on it.”
Why this should matter to the small operator, not just the majors
Here’s the part I want supply chain businesses and independents to sit with: you don’t get to opt out of the reputational fallout. When two well-capitalized, investor-backed projects become the public face of “oil and gas got fast-tracked,” every operator who isn’t on that list — the ones still grinding through the standard permitting timeline, the ones who’ve never heard of the Permitting Council’s Executive Director, the ones who don’t have a $200 million investment threshold to clear — gets lumped into the same narrative. “The industry is getting special treatment” becomes the headline, even though the industry, in practice, is mostly still waiting in the regular line.
That’s a PR problem this industry cannot afford right now. Public trust in energy companies is already a scarce resource. A permitting program that functionally benefits a handful of large, well-connected players while everyone else pays dues in the standard process is the kind of asymmetry that fuels exactly the “energy industry playing by different rules” narrative that independents have spent decades trying to shake.
What I’d like to see
I’m not calling for FAST-41 to be scrapped. I’m calling for the industry — trade associations, independent operator groups, the supply chain businesses who never show up on a federal dashboard — to start asking publicly how projects get selected, who’s applying, who’s being turned away, and why the current oil and gas cohort is so small. If the program is going to be used as a talking point for “unleashing American energy,” it needs to actually look like American energy — not two companies in one county.
Transparency isn’t the enemy of this industry. Selective transparency is. And right now, FAST-41 is giving critics a very easy story to tell.
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