Oil Industry Seeks to Engage Public on Energy Policy
One of the overarching messages coming from the oil industry these days is that they have generally done a bad job of engaging, educating and communicating with the public.
The oil and gas industry made the case this past week at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston* that if they could just educate and engage the public about oil development through honest and transparent communication, the public—and by extension, the Congress—would buy into it.
The message from the industry is clear: domestic oil and gas development is cleaner, safer, more efficient and more productive than ever (which it is). Existing perceptions about the industry are failing to keep up with accurate representations, industry representatives and others argue, and to prevent the economy from collapsing on itself, the United States must make it easier to develop its own fossil fuel resources, both offshore and on.
“I think the rhetoric is really seriously getting in the way of progress,” Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil, said during a panel discussion at the event. While Odum and leaders of the petroleum, trucking, and airline industries in the opening session defended the need for an honest, open dialogue, others in that coalition apparently didn’t get the memo. One oil company executive from the exploration sector argued that because they continue to find more resources than were originally predicted, “the world is not running out of energy [oil] resources.”
Cleavages in the left, right and middle
Whether real or perceived, cleavages within the industry are not as sharp as those in the public sphere – at least not as sharp as the mainstream media would like you to believe. But those divisions are not necessarily cast along party lines says Jason Grumet, executive director of the non-partisan National Commission on Energy Policy.
“When energy policy gets serious it becomes much more about regionalism than partnership,” said Grumet.
Grumet said he has had some success finding areas where desperate parties can agree through his bipartisan group that was formed to find consensus on energy issues. Grumet also said that moving forward on energy was easy in principle, but much tougher when it came down to the nuts and bolts of policymaking.
“It’s too easy to see the vision and think you can get there by Thursday,” Grumet said on Monday morning.
*Thanks to the American Petroleum Institute for providing travel and lodging support for the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. In part II I will explore some of the policy implications I gleaned over the week.
Image: Tim Hurst
I honestly don’t “get” what they’re thinking, I don’t get why anybody who knows anything about petroleum engineering would want to invest in oil exploration in and around the US. They’re just blatantly ignoring two facts. First, all the known and even suspected oil reserves left anywhere near North America wouldn’t power this country for a year. But second, and more importantly, we used up all of the oil that can be gotten to for below $70 to $80 a barrel back in the 1970s, and the Saudis, with their much more favorable geography and much deeper reserves, can “crash” the price of oil down to $30 a barrel any time they want to put us out of business. The west Pennsylvania oil fields, the southern California oil fields, the Texas/Oklahoma oil fields, they’re all basically empty. What’s left is deep offshore oil and oil shale; how are either of those supposed to be even minimally competitive with oil from a part of the world where oil still sprays up out of the ground under pressure on its own?
And that’s assuming that anybody still thinks that it’s a good idea to keep burning oil. There’s plenty of room left to argue about what comes after oil, and when; there isn’t enough lithium in the world to give everybody an electric car, bioethanol consumes as much energy (from oil!) as it produces, there may not be enough cropland and water in the world for biodiesel, algae-based fuels and compressed-air powered vehicles are still experimental.
But drilling for oil within and around North America? Don’t you have to be dumb as a sack full of hammers to think that’s anything but a straight downhill road to bankruptcy? Even if we are stuck with oil for another generation, wouldn’t investment in ultra-efficiency gasoline vehicles be more profitable than investing in oil on a continent where oil /by definition/ costs twice as much to extract as anywhere else?