Karr Ingham - President, Texas Alliance of Energy Producers Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Six twenty three is our time here in Houston's Boy News.
So he got our attention last week when we found
out that Chevron getting ready to slash its workforce but
up to twenty percent. It's headquarters now here in Houston,
of course, so we're talking maybe seven eight thousand people
worldwide who will end up losing their jobs. Join us
talk about it. As Car Ingham, president of the Texas

(00:22):
Alliance of Energy Producers, I guess the question we are
curious about the car and I don't know if we
have a field get for you know where these layoffs
are coming from, but you know, this being their world
headquarters at this point, how many of these layoffs to
expect will impact Houston.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
I don't think we do know the answer to that
question yet. There probably will be some. I mean, you know,
in a state where they are big and active and
as you said, just relocating their headquarters to Houston. And
by the way, welcome to the great state of Texas, Chevron.
This is where you should be rather than in California,
certainly in this environment. But it's hard to imagine that

(01:02):
there won't be some of those in Texas. But this
is not really a result of things that are going
on in Texas, and certainly not in their upstream or
their exploration production side of the business. They do have
some upstream difficulties in other parts of the world, and
they're trying to acquire and they have been trying to
acquire the s Corporation for some time. They're in a

(01:25):
bit of a dust up with Exxon Mobile over that
and it's dragging out and it's costing them some money.
And they're trying to develop the field somewhere else in
the world. But they're very active in Texas, very active
in the Permium basin. They are moving to Texas and
those operations are going just fine. So in addition to
these difficulties that we just talked about, this is also

(01:48):
a time where the industry has simply been producing more
with fewer people. This is an industry that has gained
to some extraordinary efficiencies and productivity increases over the year.
Chevron certainly has been the beneficiary of this, and so
any opportunity to cut costs and still maintain their core

(02:13):
business and in fact kind of shift the focus to
their core business some which is in Texas and drilling
for oil and gas in the Permia and they're going
to take it.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
Well, yeah, and you know technology is going to change
as always does, and there'll be fewer people that need
to be employed because of technology. I guess that's just
the nature of any business right now, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
You just hit the nail on the head. All industries
and all businesses endeavored to do this over time. It's
just been extraordinarily obvious. In oil and gas, there was
a time in twenty fourteen, which was an activity peak
before a big industry downturn. We had over three hundred
thousand Texans directly employed in upstream oil and gas, which

(02:58):
is operating and producing service companies and drilling companies. I
numbers one hundred thousand less than that now, but we're
producing millions more barrels a day than we were then.
So the what the industry has achieved in terms of
raising production and bringing more product to the market, both
in terms of crude oiland natural gas for the benefit

(03:20):
of consumers, it's truly extraordinary. But as you say, they're
doing it with the less people, they're doing it with
fewer rigs. I mean, the rig count nor employment are
anywhere close to what they once were, and they likely
never are going to be again. And so it's a
shifting nature of an economy. It's a shifting nature of
an industry that has gotten extremely well at what it does.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Cars loves I have you let me let me ask
you about what Urcott is telling us. I realized this
is not necessarily right up your Bellywick here. But we
have Urcott, which is our you know, Economic Council on
a Reliability basically saying that by next summer we're going
to have power problems here in the state. We have
another story Newsweek saying that by twenty forty five we're

(04:03):
likely to be the most populous state in the country
by a long shot, overtaking California. How do we marry
those two things? How do we continue to welcome so
many people to Texas without being able to provide enough
energy for them?

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Well, you're right, you're right in one respect. It's not
the it's not the core of what the text Alliance
of Energy Producers focus on. The focus is on, but
it is a huge focus of ours. Why is this
Because we generate a lot of power with natural gas
in Texas, And as you may know, I'm an economist

(04:39):
as well as as the president of this trade group
of great groups of text Alliance of Energy Producers. And
you know, it's just a simple fact that if you incentivize,
and I mean greatly incentivized, at both the federal and
state level to development of technologies like wind and solar,

(05:03):
you're going to get a greater capacity. You're going to
get greater share of those things as a as a
share of the total capacity of power generating ability in
any particular region, in this case the Arcot region of Texas.
And had we just left this to markets, And frankly,
it's just my view as an economist, not noil and

(05:25):
gas guy, that if we had more dispatchable thermal power
from natural gas, coal or nuclear, we might not be
in this position. We've run short of power because we
don't have reliable power.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
All the time.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
In other words, we have to change the incentives, and
we have to change them the big way. Well, I
got to run, Car, but thank you, as always, do
appreciate it, Car, My pleasure to you guys. You bet
President of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, Car Ingham.
It is six twenty nine