A lesson of modern business is the importance of listening to the customer. For the oil and gas industry, a lesson of modern politics should be the importance of listening to the enemy.
Without doubt, the industry has political enemies. Groups exist whose rhetoric makes clear the aim of moving humanity away from its reliance upon fossil energy. For most of them, the reasons are environmental: surface disturbances from drilling and production, for example, or emissions from the combustion of hydrocarbons. The most extreme groups seem motivated by little more than fundamental prejudice against oil and, to a lesser degree perhaps, natural gas.
Widespread antagonism
Antagonism toward oil and gas influences politics around the world. In Europe, politicians have let fear about climate change replace critical thought. A lively scientific debate about the nature and extent of the threat receives no attention at all in Europe, where countries seem to be in a race to tax oil consumers into immobility. In the US, where healthy doubt remains about humanity's ability to throw the climate much off its natural course, the making of energy policy nowadays comes down to a search for ways to produce and use less oil and-yes-natural gas. For all the lip service paid to gas, electricity deregulation bills still propose subsidies for gas alternatives. And the vast and growing federal acreage off limits to drilling can do nothing for gas supply.
The bias is real. And it thrives partly because the industry fails to justify its work across the whole spectrum of hydrocarbon value.
Refiners regularly list the wonderful substances essential to modern life-besides gasoline-made from petroleum. Producers, especially in the US, tend to leverage their political agendas on national security and on how much they pay in taxes. The raw-material and manufacturing segments of the industry thus tell separate stories. That needs to change.
It needs to change because the industry's enemies have figured out integration. They address downstream consequences by attacking upstream activities. The environmental activist group Greenpeace opposes drilling off the UK, for example, on the basis of the global warming that might result from eventual combustion of the produced hydrocarbons. Yet most producers probably consider global warming a refining-and-marketing issue.
In the US, an integrated campaign like that against oil and gas might be potent. Except for the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, integrated companies are abandoning US production, leaving it to independent companies to fight political battles on behalf of domestic supply. How many independents are prepared to defend their operations against attacks motivated by panic over climate change, concern about ozone smog, or assertions about the cancer risk of fine particles?
The industry needs to integrate the political justification of its activities in the same manner that its enemies have begun to integrate their obstructionism. It must articulate a unified reason why it is a good thing, on balance, to find, produce, rearrange, and ultimately oxidize hydrocarbon molecules.
The industry needs a universal statement about the value of oil and gas and the activities related to them. The statement must say more than that the substances represent chemical energy with the well-demonstrated ability to enhance comfort and amplify the achievements of people. It must say more than that development of the oil and gas resource creates wealth for companies and individuals that becomes commerce for whole communities and tax revenue for governments.
The statement must express the transcendent value common to all observations about how oil and gas enhance economies and leverage human energy. It is that fluid hydrocarbons, in countless and profound ways, improve the experience of human life.
Detriments and benefits
Yes, extraction of oil and gas disrupts the surface-but not much and not for long. Yes, the combustion of hydrocarbons emits substances that aggravate air pollution and that might constitute a factor of climate mechanics as yet little understood.
Environmental detriments, however, always must be assessed against the benefits that oil and gas provide to the experience of human life. The costs of deliberately not producing and not using this gift of nature have human consequences that should never be ignored.
The oil and gas industry-all of the oil and gas industry-needs to get better at saying so.
