Is the new Sec of Energy Chris Wright going to be positive for the industry? I’ve seen him speak a couple of times, and he seems like an ok dude that knows his way around the oil patch.
I would think an O&G guy, especially an O&G guy who has worked both E&P and OFS side of things is a whole lot better for O&G than the current secretary.
Who knows. I had a meeting with him once in 2012 back when I was a junior somebody. He is not lacking in self-confidence.
Our President elect seemed to like randomly firing cabinet folks in prior admin, so he may be in his post for a few months, no telling.
One could make a strong argument the current secretary/regime has been great for fee mineral owners (everyone on here). Oil prices have been quite steady the last 4 years staying above $70 most of the time which is all you can ask for as a mineral owner. The argument of a president/secretary of energy being “good” for energy centers around drilling of federal lands, which none of us benefit from when it comes to our fee interests.
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Not everyone on here is a fee mineral owner. NM Federal land makes about 1.75mmbd and the vast majority of that has ORRIs. There are a whole lot of very valuable privately held Fed ORRI’s in NM that still need a whole lot of drilling.
I personally don’t think any administration is going to do anything to halt that in NM as NM (despite what its leaders say in public) is uber dependent on the petro dollar.
Otherwise, yes, prices have been steady and consistent under the present administration. And oil prices have been better the past 20 years under a Democratic administration.
Maybe this guy helps sort out LNG exports. Pushes through some pipelines. Maybe he does nothing. But sometimes it’s nice to hear the secretary speak and not think they know nothing about what they are talking about.
fwiw, I just read Michael Lewis’s (BlindSide, Big Short, Moneyball, etc) 5th Risk. A lot of it is about the DOE. You’d think I would know this after working at Sandia Labs for 2 years, but Lewis’s first point is that what the DOE does has very little to do with oil and gas, or even energy. It’s nuclear. Weapons, security, monitoring, cleanup, research, particle accelerators, etc. Which is why its usually led by a physics guy/gal. It’s not even nuclear power, that is handled by the much maligned NRC.
So yeah, not sure how much of Chris Wright’s experience is going to be relevant here, or if we should expect anything at all. He at least went to MIT so he’s like a lot of the DOE mgmt, current and prior.
The book wasn’t great, but it was an interesting look at big government, and the main premise is that Trump in his prior admin continually selected people woefully unqualified for (or interested in) their governmental appointments. Which despite Lewis’s obvious bias, is probably unchallenged.