East Texas Business

By GREG JUNEK
Business Editor

The largest oil and gas association in the state has begun placing advertisements in regional print and broadcast media in support of drilling on federal lands to offset crude oil imports.

Alex Mills, president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, and Kurt Abraham, the alliance's director of professional development, met with Tyler Courier-Times -- Telegraph editors Friday evening to promote their campaign to "Drill Now! Produce More!" Mills said the first advertisement in the Tyler newspaper was scheduled to run today.

"Really, what we're doing is trying to educate the public about the true record of this industry and what it can do to be part of the solution to the energy problems," Mills said.

He said officeholders' constituencies nationwide hear many misrepresentations about the industry, its environmental record and the time it would take to develop wells offshore and deliver crude produced by those wells. If the public does not know the truth, then it is hard for them to convince their elected officials to support offshore drilling.

The government has placed about 85 percent of the federal lands available for exploration off limits, Mills said. Some officeholders have cited environmental concerns as a reason for opposing drilling, specifically offshore drilling. But, he added, since the much-publicized 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara -- which is still being used as ammunition by those opposed to offshore drilling -- the industry has had a "great" environmental record. Because of technological advancements, offshore drilling has become environmentally friendly, Mills said.

For example, hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 115 offshore platforms and damaged 52 more in the Gulf of Mexico, but the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service reported that no major spills occurred. Also, the MMS and the U.S. Coast Guard have reported that only 3 percent of oil spilled offshore comes from platforms for drilling and production, Mills said. Abraham said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's argument of the lag time before offshore crude could arrive for refining has been "a flat-out lie."

It would not take a decade for that crude to arrive, he said. Years ago, in the deeper waters, it might have taken seven or eight years to determine field size and build facilities to put a field on line. But, thanks to technology, that time has been reduced to two to three years.

"In the last 12 years, the ability to develop new fields offshore, particularly in deep water, has come a long, long, way," Abraham said.Mills said $700 billion per year leaves this country with the importing of crude oil. "If we can displace that with domestic energy -- be it crude oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar ... that creates jobs, it creates economic activity, it creates a tax base," he said.

Mills and Abraham said the alliance picked East Texas as the place to kick off its campaign because of the region's rich petroleum heritage. He said the alliance is friends with U.S. representatives from the area, but surveys have shown many in the East Texas population believe some of the misrepresentations circulating about the energy industry.

"You've got a lot of new people who live here who may not know about that history and the good record of that industry," Mills said.