Tim Stewart is the president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association. He was previously chief of staff of the House Natural Resources Committee.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Federal Newswire: What is the U.S. Oil and Gas Association?
Stewart: U.S. Oil and Gas Association is the nation's oldest gas industry trade association, going all the way back to 1917. [It] used to be called the Mid-Continent Radio and the Gas Association.
We've been around a long time. I've been at the helm for about four years now, and it's been interesting because I've been in the industry, but I come from outside. I had a Capitol Hill career, and I've done 20 years of consulting and lobbying on behalf of interests all across the spectrum, from the left to the right.
Federal Newswire: What challenges does the industry face in Washington?
Stewart: There are 6,000 consumer products that we use every day that have oil or natural gas as the base ingredient. That's everything from my toothbrush to the ibuprofen I'm going to take. It is everywhere, and it has made our life immeasurably better.
[The] problem is you get in this public debate and it's always about gasoline prices or it's always about emissions, and it's not about the other, scalable things that happen that make our life immeasurably better.
The hardest thing for me is it has become this ideological, dogmatic debate, where you're either with the one side or against one side. The result is we start to slide back, and for the first time in our life that we see energy poverty is now a real issue to millions of Americans.
It didn't used to be that way, and it doesn't have to be that way. That's one thing that I'm trying to change. We've got to end energy poverty. The way to do that is to produce more of everything.
Federal Newswire: Are you optimistic or pessimistic that this will change?
Stewart: Recently I've been doom-scrolling. In the past, my industry would be beaten up on big oil's price gouging, etc., and that was always the game plan.
For the first time in my 30 years in energy politics and policy, the public isn’t buying that Big Oil argument anymore. It merged with invasion of privacy, particularly on things like gas stoves and furnaces.
People took offense to that. That changes the message, and that's what gives me a sense of optimism going forward. I think the public and the voters are going to say, we want more of all of the above. We want it to be affordable. We want it to be accessible. That gives me a little bit of hope. So I'm going to be a weary optimist.
Federal Newswire: Are we seeing a kind of class conflict around energy?
Stewart: That's really what it has come down to. Let the record show that the president of the US Oil and Gas Association bought an electric vehicle for his family two years ago, primarily as an experiment to see if it worked or not. But it's been a horribly miserable experience to the point where I don't drive it anymore. My wife drives it.
I got no tax credit for buying it. It was manufactured in Germany–it's a Volkswagen. I said to the dealer, “where is the charger that comes with this thing for the home?” It was supposed to come with one. I had to buy my charger off of Amazon, rewire my garage, and then the electrician who's rewiring my garage looks up at the transformer on the telephone pole in front of my house and says, “by the way, that transformers too small, don't run your dishwasher when you're charging.”
That goes to an infrastructure problem. None of us in my neighborhood could have more EVs. My neighbor got a Tesla, but none of us can be charging electric vehicles at the same time because the system can't absorb it.
So, that's my experience. It goes to this point that Washington always [has] a solution in search of a problem. In energy in particular, they are chasing a problem that was already resolved when we switched from coal to natural gas and electric generation. We dropped our emissions 60%. That happened a year before they passed the IRA bill. That's where we're at.
My industry is probably one of the most innovative. That's a fascinating thing about the oil and gas industry.
We're fracking very differently now than we were 10 years ago. We're bringing oil and gas out of the ground and into the market in a very, very different way than we were even five years ago. The rate of innovative change in my industry is fascinating. I can't keep up with it.
Federal Newswire: How do you respond to claims that your industry is responsible for warming the earth?
Stewart: Here's a good example. Yesterday, there's a heat wave. It's hot here on the East Coast. But at the same time, my brother's field of corn in Idaho froze on Tuesday night because it dropped below 32-degrees. We're not in an era of global boiling.
Federal Newswire: What's your summary of the future of America’s oil and gas industry?
Stewart: Never bet against this industry. I have lived through every single configuration of a Congress and Administration. The reality is, our industry has outlasted Administration after Administration and bad idea after bad idea.
We produce what people need. They still want it. They're still asking for it. So don't bet against us. Our responsibility to the American people is to reduce energy poverty, make it affordable and accessible. That's the energy contract.
