*Click here or above to watch TXOGA President Todd Staples’ opening remarks*

AUSTIN, Texas – Today, Texas Oil & Gas Association (TXOGA) President Todd Staples testified during the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce’s interim hearing on the state of Texas’ electric grid and plans underway to address transmission capabilities.

See below for TXOGA President Todd Staples’ opening remarks:

(Transcript Edited for Clarity Purposes Only)

My name is Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association. Appreciate the chance to be with you all today. I want to applaud you for your durability and the depth of questions that you have asked. This is the absolutely right approach. This is why you’re elected to represent your constituents, and we applaud the sincerity in which you are tackling each of these questions before you today. Just want to start out by stepping back for a minute and say, let’s all imagine something for a moment.

Let’s imagine we just built our home and we’re ready to move our family in. Or we just built our medical office, and our partners are ready to go in, ready to receive clients, or law office, or a warehouse, or a shop at our barn. And we’re ready to cut the power on at our convenience store. We’re ready to cut the power on, and you’re ready to have customers come in, and you’re told you can’t get power for five years. You may not get power at all. That’s what’s happening in West Texas today, and that’s what’s happening in the Permian Basin.

And it’s been known about for quite some time. I don’t want to try to interject myself on the CCN process. That’s not my area of expertise here today. But what I will tell you is that ERCOT has published studies and reports and public documents since 2019 about possibilities of fixing what’s wrong in West Texas because they don’t have enough transmission to meet the needs of a growing industry.

And that’s just what’s been public. And you know, you’ve been a part of it…there have been exhaustive workshops and meetings in different parts of the state where these ideas and this concept to build the transmission that’s needed has been conducted. This is not new information. This has not been moving fast, and if you talk to folks that have been waiting since 2013 to get what they need, they would tell you it’s not fast at all.

New transmission that’s being built is going to be paid for by the people that sign up and West Texas oil and gas producers are ready to sign up and ready to pay.

Now there’s been a lot of conversation about why don’t they just pay for what they need? They are doing that today. They’re having generators. They’re having gas turbines. Their gas has been negative for about most of the first six months of this year. And you would think let’s go build a gas plant. Right? I thought that when I first heard about this problem several years ago, went to people and said, we ought to stop what we’re doing and go build a gas plant in West Texas. Everyone I spoke to that knew about how this system works laughed at me and said, go with your money…you’re not going to do it with mine. The reason they said that is because you have such an amount of renewable power in West Texas today that new generation won’t get to run at a rate sufficient to make it viable to go in and to build that new generation completely; that’s what’s needed.

That is the reality of it, and I’d love to answer more questions about it. But this has been needed for over ten years, a dozen years likely. All while this has been needed and West Texas’ needs have not been met, West Texans have been paying for build-out of transmission in Houston, San Antonio, and the Valley and everywhere else in Texas, and West Texans have been paying for that. West Texas gas producers that are fortunate enough to be hooked up to the grid…have been paying for that.

Now when it’s time to build out West Texas, we’re saying let’s wait. But every year, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of transmission are built around the state. This is not a new concept. But the message is being sent to that homeowner, convenience store operator, or oil and gas operator is that we’re not going to do it. What we need to be saying is, how are we going to do it and do it efficiently, and the experts that have determined the voltage size, we didn’t do that. We didn’t determine the voltage size. We didn’t determine the routes. In fact, we had several work groups that looked with suspicious eyes at a plan that would introduce a new voltage class in Texas. Because we’re thinking we don’t want to pay for something that’s not needed. But our experts, who are the biggest consumers of electricity in the state, could not find a reason to argue against the plan that ERCOT came up with based on the data that they had. So, we thank you for asking these questions.

We are unapologetically in support of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan because it is absolutely needed. The Permian Basin has become a giant manufacturing center for energy, and that’s what it is today, and [West Texas] needs to have the power to continue forward.

This week, TXOGA President Staples penned an op-ed for the Midland Reporter-Telegram titled “Protect the Permian, Power West Texas.”

See below for excerpts from TXOGA President Staples’ op-ed for the Midland Reporter-Telegram:

“As the oil and natural gas industry continues to evolve and lead the way in innovations to meet domestic and global energy needs, power demand has outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to sustain West Texas’ growth.

“The current electric transmission serving West Texas is so constrained that ERCOT has notified power users in the region they will likely face regional rotating outages at peak times because the load growth has overloaded the transmission infrastructure and its ability to deliver power. This is a threat to all electricity customers in the region.

“Electricity is a pillar of modern infrastructure; hindering its growth is a disservice to the pro-business, pro-growth beacon Texas has become.

“Implementing the Permian Basin Reliability Plan strengthens West Texas, and when West Texas is strong, America is stronger.”

To read the full op-ed, click here.