Vote for Bo French for the Texas Railroad Commission.
This is a bit in the weeds for industry outsiders, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.
Jon Rosenthal is far too ideologically compromised to be allowed at the helm of the Railroad Commission. Allowing him to tinker with that agency will cause serious damage to the Texas economy.
Below is just ONE of a litany of destructive policies Rosenthal openly wants to pass. We don't even know yet which policies he'll push that are too radical for him to say out loud before an election.
On to the policy:
Rosenthal wants to end routine flaring and venting of gas across Texas except in narrow emergencies, with continuous monitoring, strict capture rules, with extractive penalties for operators who don’t comply. That policy will damage the oil and gas industry.
That's not debatable. It's a fact.
Flaring in the Permian isn’t some optional habit. Most of those wells are drilled for oil. The gas that comes with it is a byproduct, and a lot of the time there’s nowhere for it to go, except for flaring.
Gathering lines, compressors, plants, and the big pipelines to the Gulf Coast don’t appear the day a well is completed. They take years and serious money. New pads, remote leases, plant turnarounds, or just plain capacity limits mean the gas has to be handled on the spot. Texas rules already push operators to burn it in a flare rather than vent it raw, and the Railroad Commission hands out temporary exceptions under Rule 32 for exactly these cases. When the pipes are full, Waha prices (spot prices at the hub near Pecos) routinely drop to nothing or go negative. Operators have had to PAY to get rid of the gas just so they can keep producing oil. The flare is what lets the well stay online while midstream catches up.
Shut that option down except for narrow emergencies and the choices get ugly fast. No place to put the gas and no permit to flare it means you shut the well in. Oil stops. Royalty checks stop. Severance taxes stop. The cash that was going to drill the next location dries up. Marginal wells that penciled with a temporary flare become stranded. Smaller operators who can’t write a check for miles of new line and compression feel it first; even the bigger ones slow down because they have to overbuild pipe ahead of every pad or risk curtailments. Those costs don’t vanish. They show up as fewer wells, less production, and higher prices down the line for everything that runs on those barrels.
I’ve watched this for years on the land side. The pipes eventually get built when the economics support them. A hard ban doesn’t speed that up. It will idle wells, leave reserves in the ground, and pull money out of the pockets of landowners, counties, and the state at a time when commodity prices are skyrocketing.
We need responsible energy policies that take the realities of the industry into consideration. Like it or hate it, the world runs on oil. We need it and we do it cleaner and more safely than the foreign producers we would otherwise have to buy from.
By now, we should all have a CRYSTAL CLEAR understanding of how destructive hard left energy policies are. For perspective, ask your favorite AI to compare the difference between a gallon of gas in California and a gallon of gas in Texas.
California is an energy rich state. The difference between CA's and TX's gas price is a CHOICE that's rooted in politics and irresponsible energy policy.
#BoFrench #TexasRRC #EnergyFirst #TexasStrong