President Donald Trump has vowed to "drill, baby, drill" with promises to unleash U.S. oil and gas production. There is one problem with that -- the oil companies might not want to.
"Right now, we're running production surpluses," said Professor Eric Smith of the Tulane Energy Institute.
Smith says that it does not make sense for oil companies to produce more crude that the market isn't using. Even with oil trading above $70 a barrel, oil companies might not want to flood the market with new product, because that will cause those prices to fall.
"It doesn't take a whole lot," said Smith, explaining that is what happened when shale fracking took off.
"The rest of the world cut production in order to keep the prices up, and there's very little that President Trump or any American president can do to prevent that from happening," he said.
And Prof. Smith says that also makes banks skittish about loaning the billions of dollars it takes to find and pump new oil.
"Most of the drilling gets done with borrowed money," he explained, "and if you can't borrow the money, you can't drill."