Oil and gas companies often come in for rough handling when the general public weighs in on them.
People fault them for being greedy: "Look at those billions in profits!"
Careless: see 2010 Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico; 2005 BP Texas City, Tex., refinery.
Arrogant and dismissive: "We've been fracing wells since the ‘40s!" and "That gas in your well water isn't from my gas well!"
And, say the cynics, who for a minute takes seriously those ads touting an oil and gas company's community service or careful modes of operating? Their targets are investors, not Mom and Pop on a bucolic western Pennsylvania farm.
Major energy industry associations mostly shrug their shoulders: "What can we do?" Probably not much.
No wonder the oil and gas industry falls to the bottom in Gallup's latest annual polling of Americans' attitudes towards a list of industries.
Gallup
Since August 2001, Gallup has polled a cross-section of the American public for views on 25 industries, including healthcare, education, the federal government, grocery, accounting, computer, automotive, and—yes—publishing (in the top third).
The list of 25 has mostly remained constant for 12 years to this past August. Individual industries, as would be expected, have moved up and down.
For 2012, the computer industry topped the list, followed by restaurants, retail, and the internet. Oil and gas again sat at the bottom, although its favorable share improved slightly from 2011, to 22% from 20%. Other neighbors near the bottom were the federal government (which also improved a bit over 2011), banking (surprise?), real estate, and airlines (another shocker).
Gallup's Frank Newport explained that most Americans "come into frequent contact with the computer, food, oil and gas, and banking," yet their perceptions "differ dramatically."
He said, "The cause of the oil and gas industry's bad image is most likely the frequent and sometimes inexplicably large spikes in the price of gas"; uh, that's gasoline, Mr. Newport. But, we could probably say the same for natural gas, which has been pleasantly (for consumers) low and is likely to remain so for some time.
So, how Americans feel about an entire industry depends on its experience with a small fraction of that industry—a case of the six blind men and the elephant.
In late 2008, just before the last US general election, a driver at a gasoline pump next to me looked over, caught my eye, and said, "Prices goin' down again. It figures. They [politicians, oil executives: choose your favorite demon] always reduce the [pump] prices just before an election."
Really?
I thought of the millions of men and women who work in dozens of countries and hundreds, even thousands of companies up and down the stream of oil and natural gas exploration, drilling, production, transportation, processing, and distribution. I thought of the global companies that compete, sometimes bitterly, for fields, routes, and markets.
That would make quite a conspiracy, I thought. But, no, I didn't say anything; just shook my head, slightly. He wasn't going to listen to me…or anyone.
People
Those genuinely interested in understanding oil and gas companies must fight past the PR flak and bloviating CEOs and reach to industry's people.
Men and women work to find, drill up, produce, transport, process, and distribute oil products and natural gas using sophisticated and complex technologies developed not just to improve those jobs, but also to make them safer for those same men and women…and the environment.
Since 1985, I've been covering what the industry has come to call midstream and come to know its real center, the people: serious, conscientious professionals trying to do a job as well as it can be done. And, lately, it's attracting younger people, especially women—surely measures of success.