NEWS 8: Let's clear something up right away, why should any Texan care who sits on the Texas Railroad Commission?
THOMPSON: Texas Railroad Commission is one of the most powerful commissions in the State of Texas. It regulates oil and gas production, also surface mining in Texas. It's also one of the most corrupt commissions because oil and gas industry totally controls that commission. The true constituents here, the Railroad Commission, is not the people of Texas, but the oil and gas industry and that has to stop. We need more people who are not connected to the industry to regulate that industry, and hopefully we won't have anymore disasters like the Daisetta Sinkhole, or 16,000 uncapped wells here in Texas or seven people died in gas pipeline explosions at their homes.
WILLIAMS: Despite our name, the Texas Railroad Commission is the state's energy agency and every Texan should be concerned and make sure that this commission does what it's designed to do and that is to make sure that Texans have abundant supplies of affordable, reliable and clean energy that we produce oil and natural gas so that Texans can have cheaper fuel costs and cheaper electricity costs, make sure that we move towards diversifying our energy sources with wind and solar and clean coal and then go about the business of making sure that we advance to the next generation of scientists and technologies and engineers and mathematicians.
NEWS 8: What do you think of the Pickens Plan, one that calls for the exploitation of wind as a long term source of energy while making greater use of natural gas to fuel our cars as a bridge for moving from finite sources of energy like oil to renewable sources like solar?
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TX Railroad Commissioner
News 8 speaks to Texas Railroad Commissioner candidates Mark Thompson (D) and Michael Williams (R) about their role in government, the Pickens Plan, Texas oil production and coal fired power plants.
 
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WILLIAMS: Well, there's no doubt that Boone has come on to something. We do indeed have abundant supplies of natural gas here in America. As a matter of fact, there was a study that indicated that we have at today's consumption levels enough natural gas to, for 100 years and we can use that natural gas so that we don't have to reliant upon foreign crude, that we won't be sending $700 billion of American dollars to foreign nations and foreign dictators who don't really care about us, and then we can replace the natural gas we are using to make power with wind and solar, nuclear power and clean coal. And so in the wide parameters, I think Boone is on to something.
THOMPSON: I want to push for more wind technology, more wind energy, the only thing I want to caution, I don't want a bunch of wind turbines out in some billionaires enclave controlling wind energy for the State of Texas. I would like to see more regional and cooperative areas for wind usage for communities where they can have control and not maybe a few billionaires controlling that wind technology and that money. I don't want to go from billionaires in oil and gas to billionaires in wind technology. The gas is okay, I want to go ahead and explore more natural gas use in vehicles and everything as we progress towards more hybrid and other technologies, hopefully more green technologies.
NEWS 8: With the price of crude up, Texas oil production is booming. Can you trust the Texas Railroad Commission to be a good steward of the environment, such as making sure exploration wells are properly capped and other issues that come up out of the oil field whether it be on the land or at sea?
WILLIAMS: You know the commission has a fabulous record in terms of being a steward of protecting the environment. Today when I, when I first became a commissioner almost 10 years ago, we had 22,000 abandoned wells that had been left to the State of Texas. Today, that number is less than 9,000. In addition, we now require every oil and gas operator to have a bond covering his or her operation so that if something goes wrong there are dollars available to correct it. In addition to that, we have increased fines and fees, we've increased our enforcement activity, we've increased the number of inspectors just to make sure that as much as we want oil and gas activity in this state that we can do in a way that the protects the environment and allows our pipelines to run in a safe action.
THOMPSON: You can't trust the Texas Railroad Commission as it stands because they are taking so much oil and gas political pact money and that political action money controls the commissioners and their decisions, they're no longer thinking about what's in the best interests of the people of the State of Texas, they're thinking what the best interests of the agents or the oil and gas industry so we need to have commissioners that are totally independent. We have 16,000 uncapped wells right now, we have a huge Daisetta Sinkhole, which was possibly caused by salt water injection into the ground, we have problems throughout this whole state with environmental disasters because the Railroad Commission is not doing their job, a lot of the commissioners are looking to move to higher office and they're taking their eye off the ball, they're not protecting people in Texas anymore.
NEWS 8: The controversy surrounding the expansion of coal fired power plants -- how would you encourage research and investment in zero emissions facilities?
THOMPSON: I think that's going to come more from the private section. I'd hate to use a lot of public money to help the industry. They have a lot of coal that they want to sell, they want clean technology and I applaud them for trying to do that. Right now they haven't got clean coal technology, they're trying right now, they want to dump a bunch of carbon into the ground, and we've got enough pollutants jammed into the ground right now so we need more from the industry itself to go ahead and develop this technology and not look for the public to go ahead and foot the bill. We've had the public footing too many bills for private industry for too long.
WILLIAMS: Well, as you know, one of the things that I led for this state was our activity towards trying to win a project called Future Gen, which was a project to build the first zero emissions power plant in the world using coal and now coming up to this Legislative session in 2009, we're going to encourage the legislature to create a Texas version of that kind of initiative where we will use our Texas lignite as the primary fuel and encourage a power generator to build a facility that would get down to those near zero emissions, take that CO2 that people are concerned that may cause global warming and to permanently store much of that CO2 beneath the surface and use some of it for enhanced solar cover. We're going to ask the Legislature to do that in this session and I expect that they will.
