Texas Panhandle group calls on Trump to change oil trade practices

The Panhandle Import Reduction Initiative group recently sent a letter to the White House calling on President Donald Trump and his administration to recognize and correct what it says are unfair trade policies impacting the U.S. oil and gas industry.

Spurred by a presidential memo for Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to use the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to investigate “core industries such as steel, aluminum, vehicles, aircraft, shipbuilding, and semiconductors…critical elements of our manufacturing and defense industrial bases,” the members of PIRI want the oil and gas industry to be recognized as a core industry.

“It’s a core industry in that it reduces poverty and it increases the standard of living for people,” said Tom Cambridge, PIRI facilitator and petroleum geologist at Amarillo’s Cambridge Production Inc. “We think that having a stable oil supply in this country that is not threatened by Saudi Arabia and OPEC is good for national security.”

Cambridge says there are several hundred members in PIRI, most of whom are producers and royalty owners — “Mainly those that are out of work or have been financially hurt by what’s going on when oil prices dropped,” he said.

Cambridge — along with Daniel Fine, Harold Courson and John Yates Jr. — formed PIRI in 2014 after they say then-Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi convinced Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members to allow Saudi Arabia to overproduce oil to drive down prices.

These are old producers of old oil in conventional reservoirs that can’t compete with shale factory drilling and production. Their day is at least paused if not over.

We have spent more than 100 years producing the conventional reservoirs and now we are in a new era of producing the source rocks of those same conventional reservoirs. It is in effect a new beginning for the oil industry that many of us did not see coming. How long it wil last is anybody’s guess.

This is near pure market force driven pricing and the non-competitive producers are out.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.