During the debates, it seems Democratic candidates had a field day using oil and gas as a punching bag. Presumable nominee Joe Biden promised to end drilling and hydraulic fracturing at least on federal lands. Former candidate Bernie Sanders threatened to prosecute oil and gas executives for crimes against humanity due to their presumed role in the still-debated issue of human-caused climate change. He never mentioned specific laws deemed to have been broken.
There seems to be a general belief that the environment and the oil business are totally at odds. For everyone who works directly in the oil and gas business, the question arises of how to counteract the growing flood of negative press and disinformation.
One of the industry’s best-known advocates is Alex Epstein, author of several books including 2014’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. When asked if the attacks are working, if average people’s perception of the industry is skewed to the negative side, he said, “I definitely think the perception is problematic and probably getting worse.”
He sees the two most dominant perceptions revolving around seeing oil and gas as “a necessary evil” and “an unnecessary evil.” The unnecessary evil group believes the oil industry’s problems leave it with no redeeming graces, and that renewables can readily replace what it does provide.
Even Republicans, he said, feel the Green New Deal is not so much wrong as it is too extreme and too fast. “The energy vision they’re implicitly committed to, by generally supporting freedom, is a future in which we’re using more fossil fuels, not less. I think of that as a moral future, but I don’t think even most Republican politicians have the clarity and the confidence to espouse such a future.”
For the industry itself, Epstein sees clarity as a key to changing the prevailing narrative.
“I think the first thing is to get the internal clarity and confidence that what they’re doing is good and specifically that the fossil fuel industry is making the world a better and better place to live.”
Opponents believe that the climate has deteriorated in recent decades and that fossil fuels are to blame. On the contrary, says Epstein, “The world is getting to be a better and better place for humans to live—including, we’re safer from climate than we’ve ever been.
“Nature didn’t give us a safe climate that we made dangerous, it actually gave us a dangerous climate and we’ve made it far safer, in large part using fossil-fueled machines.” He credited the work done by such machines with providing low-cost food, medicine, and more. “No other form of energy is even close” in terms of providing reliable, low-cost production.
Regarding self-promotion methods, Epstein feels oil and gas could learn from other industries. Most, he said, promote themselves as being the best at what they do and what they provide. “The fossil fuel industry rarely does that. They usually say, ‘We’re a form of energy (emphasis his), and all forms of energy are good.’ But why should people care about you if you’re just one of many forms of energy?”
When speaking, Epstein stresses that no other form of energy can come close to providing needs for all kinds of use, including heavy machinery, for billions of people.
A controlling factor of the energy debate centers on the idea that fossil fuels are causing catastrophic climate change, which the industry must address. Said Epstein, “There’s a difference between causing some climate change (emphasis his) and causing catastrophic climate change.” He continued, “Rising CO2 levels is not something that should cause us to stop using fossil fuels, as long as that’s the lowest-cost form of energy.”
The Green New Deal does not see earth from a human perspective—how good the planet is for humans to inhabit—but rather from from an anti-human perspective. According to Epstein, the Green New Deal asks, “How little impact can humans have?”And for the Green New Deal, “the smaller the impact, the better.”
Dozens of organizations, in various producing states and nationally, promote various aspects of oil and gas interests. One of those is Denver-based Energy Strong. Jack Hamlin is a founder and vice president of the organization, founded in 2018.
Energy Strong came about when Hamlin and others realized that the industry’s opponents were flooding social media with negative messages, while the industry itself was ignoring social media altogether. “You had anti-oil and gas people perpetuating fallacies about the industry—a lot of anecdotal stuff—not a lot based on actual fact or statistics,” he said, and no one was counteracting that disinformation.
“The oil and gas industry is terrible at marketing itself and talking about the good things it does,” Hamlin observed, “and I think society has become so spoiled, they don’t understand where a lot of their products come from, they don’t understand that electricity comes largely from fossil fuels.”
Hamlin and his group felt companies and organizations were overlooking opportunities to educate the public on how the industry benefits them. He also saw a lack of coordination between upstream, midstream, downstream, and petrochemicals. “It was very tribal—no one ever talked to each other, even though we’re all in the same industry and the same supply chain.”
Energy Strong’s purpose was to unite all aspects of the industry to help educate the public through social media, as well as finding ways to give back to the community.
Instead of abandoning some of the opposition’s hot spots like Boulder and Broomfield, Hamlin said they wanted to actively engage in the debate, including the listening end. “We wanted to hear peoples’ gripes and what they thought of the industry, so that we could assemble that data,” he said. Hamlin wants to take it a step further, then, and educate the public regarding misconceptions. “We would come back then and fix it with data.”
They quickly engaged, with Proposition 112, which would have ordered a setback of 2,500 feet from an oil and gas facility to any waterway, flood plain, occupied building or a long list of other locations. “By the time you drew circles around all the stuff that was supposed to be set back from, one or two percent of the state was left open for drilling,” Hamlin said.
Voters voted down Prop 112 by about a 12 percent margin. In the same election, however, voters put a very anti-oil government in place, which came right back with Colorado Senate Bill 181 “which was a kind of local control, anti-oil business legislation.”
Hearings happened quickly, with little opportunity for industry input, so Energy Strong organized some oil and gas voices to point out that the industry is safe and necessary. Their main point was that the Colorado oil industry had become cleaner and safer than its counterparts elsewhere in the globe, so shuttering it domestically would cause more oil and gas to be imported from countries with poorer environmental track records.
He was struck by the fact that neither the legislators nor the media wanted to hear the industry’s side. “That’s when it hit me, we’re in a fight we don’t even realize we’re in.” He saw that, while data is part of it, the fight is mostly emotional. “People think we’re killing their families and poisoning their children, and that’s ground zero, that’s not a place that a lot of companies or organizations want to go to, but that’s where we need to go.”
Education can eradicate fear, he said, and fear is powerful.
Source Rock Midstream President Ben Samuels agrees that social media is the place to engage and that the industry should stop avoiding a good discussion.
“It starts from the ground up,” he said. “For years now, people in the oil and gas industry have been pretty silent. Oil and gas has been Public Enemy No.1 a number of times over the years, and I think the reaction to that for most people in the industry has been to stay silent, to stay behind the scenes. I think in order for the public really to understand what’s truly at stake here, there’s going to have to be more voices and proponents that are actually talking about the issues.”
And social media is where the fight is currently taking place. “When your opposition has picked the arena, you’ve got to step into that arena and play ball,” he said.
Samuels hosts a podcast, “Bring in the Closers,” which focuses on business and sales, “with a clear slant toward oil and gas.” Most of the social media fight, he said, is up to the younger generation, specifically those under 35, because they are more familiar with it and because they have longest view of the future.
The message for Samuels, as for Epstein, is that oil and gas provide billions of people around the globe with cheap, reliable energy in ways not available from any other alternative. To discuss the ending of drilling and fracturing, he said, would have devastating economic impact across the globe—and not just from loss of industry jobs.
Recognizing that even oil and gas are not perfect, it’s still by far the best option, in his view. “I can’t say that oil and gas is without impact. But I think it’s degrees of magnitude, and what are the other viable options that are truly available and scalable that achieve the same goal.”
He added that wind and solar have their own issues. “No one really talks about what it takes to extract the rare-earth minerals to be able to create a wind turbine,” He said. Samuels also cites the energy used for the tons of steel and concrete used in construction. And “It kills birds.” Overall, Samuels believes the negatives of “clean” energy should be brought into the conversation as well.
Two of the Permian’s top producing counties are in New Mexico, which also has other oil and gas interests in the state’s northwest corner and elsewhere. Ryan Flynn has been president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association (NMOGA) for three and a half years. During that time the organization has communicated in various media and forums about the benefits of energy in improving quality of life, but also about the industry’s record on the environment and safety and its contributions to the community as a whole, Flynn said.
It is important to take the high road in the discussion. “Everything we do is grounded in facts—we don’t engage in partisan political attacks. Our opponents have the luxury of not having to be accountable for anything they say, whereas us, when we represent our industry, we really are held—rightly so—to a high standard.”
Seeing teamwork as vital, Flynn said NMOGA has worked with other state and national organizations in sharing information and coordinating the message.
“We’ve commissioned research studies to talk about certain issues like contributions to the economy and taxes,” along with studies on industry emissions and how oil and gas companies are using best practices to reduce methane emissions, he said.
Education campaigns have used radio, TV, and social media to “combat anti-industry rhetoric” in New Mexico. “There’s a lot our industry can be proud of,” he said.
Flynn agrees that the industry for too long tended to “retreat from some of these more difficult conversations,” instead hoping that just doing a good job and giving back to the community would be actions that would speak for themselves. In the last two years, he said, industry leaders have realized that they can’t stay under the radar and not engage with the opposition’s well-funded, activist disinformation campaigns.
The consensus among the four correspondents is that the industry must actively engage in the public debate wherever that discussion is happening, using facts to counter much of the hyper emotionalism promoted by many oil and gas opponents.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
By Paul Wiseman
I have long thought that our industry not only needs to defend itself against misinformation but also it needs to educate the younger people that are so easily influenced specially when something like the climate is the topic. I personally don’t think that most people now days realize or every knew that 95% of everything they use in their lives today comes from oil & gas in one way or another and that includes the people that fight against it. To remove it is not realistic and would be devastating financially to every person, industry and government. The public must be educated specially the younger generation.