WASHINGTON — Meet the “gas and oil” industry.
Source: Houston Chronicle
In an ad campaign launched Monday to highlight oil and gas companies’ efforts to address global warming, the American Petroleum Institute, the sector’s biggest lobbying group, reversed the industry’s traditional moniker to focus on natural gas, a fossil fuel with lower carbon emissions than oil.
“This is natural gas and oil,” the ads read,” This is energy progress.”
Within the oil industry, natural gas has long been secondary to crude, regarded with so little value historically that it was burned off at the wellhead — a practice that continues to this day in areas without adequate pipelines. But with gas now flowing to power plants, chemical facilities and even to fueling stations for vehicles, it is a lucrative part of the industry and one expected to grow as the world moves to reduce emissions.
Still, to veterans of the industry, the term gas and oil sounds like a marketing gimmick, another in a series of moves by major oil companies to improve their image in the wake of a messy fight over climate change in the 1990s.
“Usually, you always see it as oil and gas,” said Charles “Cactus” Schroeder, 65, president of Chisholm Exploration in Abilene. “It’s probably a play on words based on the fact they want to emphasize clean energy and help with climate change.”
The advertising campaign is set to go nationwide and will cost “seven figures,” API said, with spots on television, radio, billboards and online, part of an industry-wide strategy to bring public attention to the economic benefits of drilling as well as their own efforts to reduce the environmental damage caused by the production and consumption of their product.
It is not the first time the group has played with industry terminology, with API President Mike Sommers proclaiming 12 months ago the United States was again, “the leading producer of natural gas and oil.” Following an event commemorating the launch of the ad campaign Monday, Sommers downplayed the significance of his language.
“Sometimes we use gas and oil; sometimes we use oil and gas,” he said. “We use them interchangeably.”
During API’s Monday’s annual “State of the Energy Industry” event, oil executives, community activists, consultants, labor unions and politicians, including Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston, and Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lake Dallas, came together to make the case against recent calls by Democratic presidential candidates for bans on hydraulic fracturing.
“I had 1,600 laborers on [the Dakota Access pipeline] job, and I’m not talking about for a week or a month,” said Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “We have too many gutless politicians here in Washington, DC and around the country pampering to extremists instead of talking to us in the sector.”
But with scientists warnings’ of the looming consequences of fossil fuels growing more dire, the energy sector has grown increasingly diligent in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, in particular methane.
A group of the world’s largest oil companies pledged in 2018 to cut those fugitive emissions to a quarter percent of their total natural gas production by 2025. One of the areas of largest concern is Texas’s Permian Basin, where producers hope a series of new pipelines will allow them to get more gas to market, instead of burning it off in an industry practice known as flaring.
“It’s going to reduce flaring, which needs to happen,” Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said in an interview Monday.
For Sommers, formerly chief of staff to ex-House Speaker John Boehner, the annual API event has become an opportunity to focus on the industry’s innovations and common ground with environmentalists. After walking out to a 1970’s rock anthem, he said hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling were “inventions as important as the iPhone.”
“We have to accelerate progress on the challenge of climate change,” he said. “Wherever the people doubt the future of oil and gas, you’re going to see API making our case. On the big issues we have far more in common than you might think
