Congress and federal agencies will keep the US oil and gas industry busy over the next 4 years. Reelection of President Barack Obama extends a period of extreme regulatory pressure and will embolden members of the 113th Congress hostile to hydrocarbon energy and the industries that supply it. Proposals threatening to raise costs and impede work will emerge simultaneously from throughout the government. Industry representatives will have to address each of them.
If it's to be taken seriously in this perilous environment, the industry must never appear obstructionist. This won't be easy. An industry summoned repeatedly to defend its interests inevitably seems at least defensive, never a constructive posture in the public square. A better stance happens also to be the most effective defense: transcendent offense. The industry therefore should construct and continuously assert a framework of principles applicable to any energy issue, against which it can assess any policy proposal, and from which it can fashion consistent responses.
Consumer interests
Above all, this framework should align industry positions with the interests of energy consumers. This is just good business. Energy consumers are the oil and gas industry's customers. They have clear goals: assurance of supply, affordability, and safety in all meanings of the term—the fundamentals of sound energy policy. Every position taken by the industry should be oriented to energy consumers and be communicated in relation to their interests.
A related principle is reliance to the extent possible on markets for energy choices and prices. Energy consumers always fare best in free markets and suffer when officialdom intrudes. The US ethanol program, with its pressure on food prices and impracticable mandates, shows the hazards of straying from market priorities.
A preference for market freedom, though, must not make the oil and gas industry averse to regulation. In fact, the industry should support regulation that helps markets function with maximum efficiently and that reconciles work with public interests such as safety, environmental care, and access to opportunity. The industry must never oppose regulation in general or government as an institution. What it should resist are regulations that stifle work and governments given to unbridled exertions of authority. An industry respectful of the need for regulation also can assert limits on the role of government; indeed, it should.
Another principle in this framework for advocacy should be public enlightenment—as opposed to education—about energy. People greatly reliant on energy should know more about the subject than most Americans apparently do. Americans don't need to know the difference between jack up and semisubmersible drilling rigs or what a catalytic cracker does. Knowledge like that comes from education, which people outside the industry have no strong reason to pursue. Enlightenment, by contrast, would awaken energy consumers to the correspondence between work by oil and gas companies and a condition they crave—the ready availability of affordable and convenient energy.
Elevating discourse
An enlightened public, a public that saw drilling and refining as related to their interests and not just to the profits of oil companies, would not be gulled easily into believing that hydraulic fracturing threatens shallow aquifers or that producers pay millions of dollars for federal leases in order to do nothing with them. An enlightened public would not tolerate the opportunistic demagoguery now prevalent in political discussions about energy. The systematic pursuit of this level of enlightenment, done for the clear purpose of refining energy discourse, would give the industry a respectable platform from which to discredit the outrageous suppositions that too readily steer energy policy-making toward expensive mistakes.
Uniform commitment to consumer interests, market freedom, judicious regulation, and public enlightenment would give the oil and gas industry's advocacy efforts context and coherency. It wouldn't ensure victory in every policy contest. But it would improve policy-making overall. That energy consumers would benefit most from this improvement should be reason enough to make the effort.
