![]() For much of its existence, the Texas panel tightly controlled how much oil drillers pumped, and it only abandoned such rationing in the early 1970s. When OPEC was established in 1960, the founding nations used the Commission as their template. ![]() Originally created in 1891 to crack down on uncompetitive practices by railroad operators in East Texas lumber country, the agency’s powers were expanded in the early 20th century to rein in wildcatters flooding the market with crude and crushing prices. But the Railroad Commission won’t get off scot-free either, with almost one in five saying they’d hold the panel responsible for a repeat of the catastrophe. If there’s a repeat disaster, respondents say they are most likely to blame the grid manager known as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the Public Utility Commission, or even the Republican governor, Greg Abbott-also up for re-election. ![]() In fact, more than half of the respondents to a University of Houston poll of 1,400 registered English- and Spanish-speaking voters said they plan to factor in how elected officials handled the freeze when they vote in the November general election. Although Railroad Commission elections normally are obscure affairs that attract little attention from voters or ambitious political aspirants, there hasn’t been much forgetting time since last year’s unprecedented Arctic chill froze natural gas wells and wind turbines, plunging the state into darkness and chaos. The Commission has been broadly criticized for failing to foresee and plan for the disaster-and for being too cozy in general with the industry it’s supposed to oversee. The outcome has the potential to shift the focus of a regulator that’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel and hostile to solar and wind, even as renewables make up an ever-larger share of Texas’s energy portfolio.Īnd voters may very well take a stand. The election is the first opportunity for Texas voters to render a verdict on the Railroad Commission’s culpability in last February’s cascading meltdown of energy, transport and water networks that stranded millions of residents for the better part of a week. Related: Gas Sellers Reaped $11 Billion Windfall During Texas Freeze Then, during the storm, the Commission was central in making billions for oil and gas executives and making Texans foot the bill.” “The Commission failed to enforce weatherization requirements on the industry, which led to the grid failing. “The Texas Railroad Commission played a major role in the February 2021 grid failure,” Luke Warford, a 32-year-old trying to become the first Democratic commissioner in almost three decades, said on his campaign website. Early voting for the March 1 primary begins Monday, the anniversary of last year’s paralyzing storm. One seat on the three-member panel that has regulated the state’s petroleum explorers for more than a century is up for grabs, with challengers to incumbent Chairman Wayne Christian, a Republican, seeking to shake up the agency roundly criticized for its performance during last year’s catastrophe. The race is the closest thing yet to a referendum on the handling of a historic storm that killed more than 200 people and paralyzed the second-largest U.S. The battle to join the Texas Railroad Commission-which, despite its name, is one of the world’s most powerful energy regulators-is now under way. (Bloomberg) - When Texans cast their ballots this election cycle, they won’t just be choosing candidates: They’ll be broadcasting whether they think the sitting politicians during last year’s deadly freeze share any of the blame.
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