They probably want to sell or lease those wells and they can't if they are blocked from going into production. They probably have a buyer lined up who will only do it if the Trump unblocks them. They will then use that money to go after something else they want and the new company might just plan on banking the wells hoping oil goes even higher in the future.
Trump and the GOP act like oil companies are being prevented left and right from pumping, they aren't. Sure there are places they are but there are plenty of places where they have decided it's not worth pumping anymore.
A perfect example is where I live in north Orange County, the Brea-Olinda field has been producing for over 100 years, there used to be thousands of wells around here but as the population grew the land became more valuable than the oil. There is still a large field that produces there but Unocal a few years ago decided it was worth a lot more to abandon the field and sell it for homes. They started shutting down the wells over a year ago and for the last 6 months there has been a small army of workers capping wells and removing equipment and tons of contaminated soil. This has to be costing them tens of millions, they chose to do this; nobody forced them to. They chose to do it because the hundreds and hundreds of acres of land are worth probably over $1B, its going to be a massive development.
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