At the 1996 annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, two propositions emerged that are worth recalling now.
One came from within IPAA. It called for a national program of environmental clean-up funded by voluntary donations from oil and gas companies and designed to improve the industry's public image.
The other proposition came from a US Department of Energy official, who urged cautious attention to the then-emergent issue of climate change.
"It is a problem we need to do something about," said Associate Deputy Secretary for Energy Programs Kyle Simpson. "But we don't want economically unsound solutions that might cost us 2-3% of [gross national product]."
The oil and gas industry's image cannot be said to have improved since 1996. And the politics of climate change has disengaged from concern about economics.
Questions due attention today are whether climate politics would have evolved more judiciously if the oil and gas industry's image actually had improved and whether the national program espoused by IPAA might have made a difference.
Program advocate
Those questions gained poignancy Mar. 20 with the death at age 85 of Lew Ward, founder of Ward Petroleum, Enid, Okla.
Ward, who drilled his first wildcat in 1963 in Oklahoma's Sooner Trend, was IPAA chairman at that 1996 meeting and an advocate of the program.
Three years earlier he had helped launch a voluntarily funded system in Oklahoma for remediating oil and gas wells of unknown ownership. That system became the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, a privatized state agency that has restored more than 14,000 sites with still-voluntary fees of 0.1% collected by the state on oil and gas sales. Ward hoped to nationalize some version of the idea.
"I don't think we're going to make the American people love us or anything like that," he had said in July 1996, when IPAA and the American Petroleum Institute formed a 17-member task force to study the proposal (OGJ, July 29, 1996, p. 49). "But they should realize the contribution this industry makes to their daily lives."
At the IPAA meeting later that year, he said, "This mission is paramount if we hope to continue to do future business in the US (OGJ, Nov. 25, 1996, p. 29)."
By then, Ward could report progress. The API-IPAA task force, which he cochaired, had a $375,000 budget for a feasibility study. IPAA's board of governors had resolved that independent producers should pay half the cost of a $25 million/year, 5-year program. And an API committee had reported favorably about the proposal to that association's management committee.
"We have never been this close to putting words into action," Ward said.
But some of the integrated companies in API's membership feared they'd have to pay for most of a program with no limits.
In April 1997, API directors decided not to participate in IPAA's program. The joint feasibility study had convinced them of the worth of a focused advertising and public relations effort. But many API members opposed the check-off funding apparatus.
By then, objections were emerging among IPAA governors as well.
Although the Oklahoma program, which included television ads supporting the industry, never achieved national scale, parts of the idea advanced. API produces television ads, for example. And IPAA has fortified its public-education efforts.
Still, appreciation outside the industry for oil and gas work has deteriorated.
Simpson's prophesy
In 1996, Simpson, the DOE official at the IPAA meeting, prophesied, "The coming global debate about global climate change mitigation will necessarily draw the nation into a debate over an energy policy."
Indeed, a lock-jawed debate about climate change now dominates discussion of energy policy. And with growing influence, activists increasingly demand that the US leave oil and gas in the ground. Their calls validate Ward's warning about the industry's social license to conduct business.
The industry still needs work on its image. And it always needs statesmen, like Ward, inclined to hitch the message to action.
Bob Tippee | Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.
