Ben Shepperd,
PBPA President
For years, the Permian Basin Petroleum Association has been the leading proponent of domestic energy, rallying around our nation’s need to establish a domestic energy policy that promotes places like “Midland, not Moscow.”
And this July while we celebrate the 248th anniversary of the founding of our United States, our efforts to encourage natural resource development that strengthens America’s security and our global position in an increasingly dangerous world are more important than ever.
Each day across the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, energy workers are developing the single largest region for energy production in the history of the world. Never has there been a oilfield as prolific and productive as what is occurring in the communities of Southeast New Mexico and West Texas.
Together these communities are responsible for more than 6 million barrels a day with records continuing to be broken each and every month. The future for the Permian Basin remains bright and our American energy policy should reflect that.
Global uncertainty with war in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a new set of challenges, make long term energy policy one of the most important issues of our time, but unfortunately we see a clear lack of understanding in Washington, D.C., by the current administration.
Our industry is grappling with new requirements to comply with new regulations on air emissions and are currently awaiting federal determination of non-attainment for ozone in the Permian Basin. In addition to those issues PBPA members are also working to operate under new requirements at the state level in New Mexico.
And if that were not enough, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has sought to designate two species as endangered, creating logistical and developmental/planning challenges.
PBPA has long supported voluntary conservation efforts that even the Service has considered successful in protecting species and habitat. However, the lesser prairie chicken and the dune sagebrush lizard both represent the interest by federal agencies, encouraged by anti-energy activists, to utilize federal laws in ways that stifle natural resource development in their aim to eliminate oil and gas production in the United States.
To be perfectly clear, oil and gas operations in the United States are the most efficient and environmentally responsible on planet earth. There is no doubt about that and claims to the contrary are deeply unfounded and unserious.
Just last year, an article in The Atlantic noted that reducing American energy production would simply displace that production to other areas of the globe and “shifting production to countries with looser standards would likely be worse for the climate.”
After 248 years, America’s greatest export may be democracy, but today our ability to protect our national security and energy security interests are also tied hand in hand to our own environmental interests and America is best served by letting American oil and gas operators in the Periman Basin drill down for freedom.