An informative discussion with Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner. One of the first questions is what is the Texas Railroad Commission, and why is it important? Thomas covers the importance of the Railroad Commission to the entire Energy sector in Texas and the United States. We cover his views on ESG, social, and key energy issues. This vote matters and I had a blast visiting with Thomas! Understanding who you vote for is important. Besides he has some really cool dogs that wanted to be in the interview.
Get involved and vote. It matters. I know that he hit my talking points about caring about ALL citizens of Texas.
Thanks for stopping by the ENB podcast, Stu
To contact Thomas here is his LinkedIn.
The following is an automated transcript, and we disavow any mistakes unless it makes us funnier or seem smarter.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:00:04] A good morning, everybody; today is just one of those great days in your life when you get to sit down and visit with someone like Tom Slocomb. I’ll tell you what, Tom. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat podcast.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:00:18] Thanks, man, thanks so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here to talk to you this morning. Get attacked by a couple of puppies is always fun too. But yeah, oh, I’m here in my hands and by the fireplace.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:00:28] I’ll tell you what, this is so cool. I’m sitting here. I’ve done some background on you, and it is really fun when you sit back and think we’re going to back up just a little bit and say, I love the cowboy hat. We’re both Texicans, and I really will have a lot of fun with this. Now you’re running for the Railroad Commission, and folks around the world don’t understand that in Texas, what is the railroad connection? I mean, Railroad Commission.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:00:59] Yeah. Sue in Texas, the Railroad Commission is in charge of oil and gas. We’re in charge of regulating all oil and gas. Believe it or not, and you might not know that by the name. So you know, that’s the first question. I get everybody’s mouth. What do you mean, the Railroad Commission, right? So you know, you got to do the 30-second second explainer. So it’s, you know, it’s great. Great campaign top. It gives me something to talk about immediately just because it’s like, Hey, you know, here’s something immediately that people have an issue with. Usually, right off the bat is the name of the place, but yeah, it’s oil and gas.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:01:33] And in Texas, oil, and gas is a little bit important because we’re I hope that was not your stomach because it that was a
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:01:41] puppy playing around. I love
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:01:44] it. You know, when you sit back and think about energy, we’re in a worldwide energy crisis right now. And when you sit back and think about how important Texas is to the United States, I love your. You’re also your yeti there, man. Don’t mess with me like that on me. Wow. You know, Texas, I’m so happy to be a Texan because if we have to secede from the union, it’s nice that legally we can.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:02:08] Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I think we’re ready to go just in case, but we got to make sure our power grid is ready to go to, right?
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:02:14] Oh yes. So let’s back up just a hair because I’ve enjoyed doing a little bit of background on you and telling our listeners about why you wanted to be on the commission because of the commission stuff. Everybody is me throwing rocks at your boulders. And tell us why you want to do this.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:02:35] Yeah. So I’ve been working in oil and gas my entire life. Unfortunate Asian oil and gas and the generation Texan. And I’ve been working out in the field a lot lately in Texas, in West Texas, and I’ve seen a lot of things in front of me. It surprised me, and I don’t see our gentleman and lady in Austin really doing the best job. I think that they could be doing. And I’ve been thinking that for a while now. But then I started getting phone calls from people, from people that work in the industry and ranchers and farmers. They were saying, Tom, we want you to do this. We really want you to do this. We have issues, and we think you’re the man that can help us out because we’ve got to do a better job on the service side, on the operator side, and dealing with the landowner’s side of the equation. And we’re just not happy with the results right now and the leadership in Austin. And I said, Well, I kind of agree with you more, so I’d be happy to take the responsibility. It is a massive responsibility. But I will say that I’m going to work incredibly hard, harder than any railroad commissioner before if you do give me that responsibility to do the right thing for Texans.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:03:52] You know, it’s kind of funny. I just had an ESG panel discussion with some folks, Kat you know, and we had Andrew and Ph.D. and Tracy with the American Association of Blacks and Energy and the ESG portion. The let me back this up with this question. Oil companies have not always paid attention to regulations and oil and gas very well. They have not done their best always. But in the last 10 years, they’ve really strived to get to that next level, and in Texas has done a great job on their own, cutting down flaring. What are your opinions on trying to help out the oil companies talk about their successes?
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:04:41] Right? And so, you know, Kat and I have been talking about reducing flaring in Texas for over a year now. We’ve had our ideas. And I actually watched Castaneda and Jim Wright’s race very closely. And, you know, Castaneda pointed out, we’ve got all this extra gas, and she wasn’t, you know, terribly wrong about that. But the argument is how much of it’s being flared, the percentages, et cetera. You know, people get hung up on these little numbers. Let me tell you about these little numbers. There’s self-reported Oh yeah, it’s a little secret, but you know that that set aside, let’s set aside that the real story is, is that we still have opportunity to make money, and that’s what Kat and I are doing. And so we started Artemus with the sole purpose of creating wealth for operators. They can take that wealth, and they can drill more wells with it. They can make money. They can decide they want to, you know, make a new investment over here on a new plant or a new facility, whatever they’d like to. But we’re in the business of making people money if they have flared gas and there have been restrictions on flare gas like, well, there’s not enough volume or the gas is too dirty, it’s got too much H2S in it. Well, we’ve got solutions for that now. You know, you just got to use a little engineering innovation, and you can figure it out. You know, it’s not terribly hard. It’s not terribly hard. And that’s what Cadden are doing. They catch really making some incredible leaps on the environmental side, showing people how much we can free upon their permitting side of the business. So, you know, companies are often restricted. Their chokepoint is the permitting side. So this mitigates that problem and creates more opportunities for your business to grow. It’s just a great opportunity for people to invest, make money, and there’s still lots of gas out there. There’s still all this opportunity. We’ve got to take advantage of it. We’ve got to create more wealth in Texas.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:06:51] Well, when we talk about bitcoin, a lot bitcoin mining, a lot of folks didn’t realize how bad or how much energy it was and how much it took. And so this whole process of saying, Hey, wait a minute, let’s not use the bitcoin mining on the normal grid. So like in ERCOT, you’re not taking power away from bitcoin mining, but you’re using it in the field. And oil companies have not had the investment in order to even keep their investment from normal depletion curves. So what I just heard and correct me if I’m wrong on this is that because there’s no investment going on, they can use this investment to go to the next well and keep the whole process going.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:07:39] It’s right. This is an additional revenue stream, and you’re right; investment has been curtailed and, you know, call it collusion, you know, call it whatever you want to. The European bankers have decided they don’t want to put their dollars in oil and gas anymore. So we have to go find new ways to put holes in the ground now. Maybe that’s a new source of funding. Maybe you’re not dealing with those bankers anymore, but maybe you also wised up, and you realize you’ve got this money. You’ve been sitting far on just burning it out there. Just like this fireplace right here, right? Right. Just like throwing money in the fireplace right now. What? Why would you just want to continue to do that if there’s really a way where you can start making money tomorrow, and even if you’re not bitcoin mining, you could be selling electricity if you work with somebody that’s got a Irkut license. So even if people don’t like bitcoin, there are still ways to make money. There is no big excuse for not wanting to get involved. There’s a huge facility over here where I’m at off 10:53 the target facility, right, man. They flare a lot of gas, and there’s nothing more than I would like than to go into that facility and start making them more money and having less H2S put in the air. So when people drive down 10:53 with liberals from Austin Drive down 10 10:53 three over there, you know it doesn’t set off their H2S monitor or, you know, in their truck. You know, there are people out here that do work in the oil field and the environmental side, and they’re looking at stuff all the time and we’ve got two or more. These people showed up at Texas. We’ve got professors, we’ve got students. They’re studying this stuff. It’s time that we started paying attention to the details and crossing our t’s and dotting our eyes. And that starts with low-hanging fruit. There’s a lot of it out there. It’s so easy. We just need to get it started on it. In a better fashion, we got to make Texas a more bitcoin-friendly mining state. There are things we haven’t done yet. We got to do.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:09:39] When you sit back and think as a Texas regulator, and in saying, wait a minute, the take away out of the Permian was not always that good. So taking a look at those microgrids seems like a really good way to flair instead of flare. Like, just like you say, turn that into energy and sell it to a local community.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:10:00] That’s right, yeah, you know, it’s not always bitcoin mining there, there are real opportunities here for some of these communities that are maybe paying more than they should be for electricity. I think you’d be paying a lot less for it. Any time we put more energy on the grid in Texas, it’s a great thing because we’re running out of it as you can. You know, you might have noticed if you were here in February, we kind of had a supply problem.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:10:25] Yeah, when you get you to get an energy
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:10:27] bill, how much a lot of it had to do with how much baseload power change we’ve had. Right. We had all these coal power fired power plants before, and Obama decided we’re not going to do that anymore. Well, we started replacing it with natural gas, but now it’s like it’s almost it’s hard to stay ahead of that curve, and we’ve got to work harder to stay ahead of it because we’re getting inundated, flooded with people moving to this state. You know, so our demand just keeps going up higher and higher every year. Our infrastructure, we’ve got to keep up with it if there’s WiFi points in it. Obviously, there were in February. We got it right. We got to make sure this thing is robust, and we got to make sure that it’s going to be here for two three four five six, seven eight years down the road, not just this winter. Hey, this one is great. I hope Greg Abbott’s right. He’s making bold statements there. Cotton, you know, saying we’re not going to have any problems there this winter. Oh yeah, hope he’s right. If he’s not, he’s going to make us look real dumb. All right. Governor Abbott, I really hope you’re right on this. I don’t want any problems. No one wants problems. So there’s no there’s there’s some shortcomings, and
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:11:34] I sure hate to use the word, President Bush. But you know, when you sit back and think nuclear, when they made fun of him or, you know, what do you think about nuclear or nuclear?
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:11:46] Good, OK, I’m a huge fan of nuclear energy. Listen, if we make more nuclear power here in Texas, that means we can export more power and more energy to people that need it most in Third World developing countries. And that’s great for Texas. We’re still making money. All right. We just expanded our market, right? And so you have more supply. You have a bigger market. You have more customers. Why not? Why not? Why aren’t we building more nuclear facilities that had a brain drain at the national level? We have a U.S. Congress that doesn’t want to work with us on it. We even have presidents that go back on their promises. You know, we were supposed to put all the waste in the UConn mountains, and then they decided, Oh, that we can’t do that. We’ve got to sell this green energy because we’ve all invested in it. Yeah, yeah. That’s also convenient, even though France is basically running the entire country of nuclear power, and they’re more liberal than y’all are. So I don’t understand what the problem is here, people. We ought to be making nuclear power very accessible, wide-scale across America. We can’t start nuclear power. We can build it safely in places where there won’t be issues with the environment, and it can be done. We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to crank it back up here in America, I agree. 100 percent.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:12:57] Well, good. I’ll tell you, that was one of my little questions there, because when you sit back and kind of go, I believe that natural gas, wind, solar, all of it’s going to be needed. There’s such an increase. I had. I was kind of shocked. I saw a report the other day that your hall’s coming from California. We’re like a thousand dollars going to Texas. There are 20. I mean, going from Texas to California or twenty-five dollars. Oh yeah. I mean, it was some crazy number like that. But when you sit back, think how many Californians are coming in here, I hope they leave their votes there.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:13:35] Well, you know, they might change their tune. And I might have mentioned I was in Austin a couple of nights ago, and I was meeting with the Blockchain Council folks. Yep. Meeting with a lot of people that have just recently moved here from California. And they like to do one thing that I like to do to, and you know what that is. They like to make money. Oh, believe it or not, these people moved here for work, and they want to make money. Now go, figure. They’re going to make more of it here in Texas. And when I got up there, and I talked to them about the opportunities in crypto and the opportunities in blockchain, and I want to make sure we move that forward in the industries, in oil and gas and energy here and foster it because we know that those technologies make us more money. Right, right. That’s a given that produces more revenue for the state of Texas, and it actually produces a cleaner environment, which, hey, that’s just the cherry on top of it, right? I like making money, but if we’re going to have a cleaner environment too, that’s a no-brainer. That’s Low-Hanging fruit. We’ve got to do it.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:14:42] Well, you know, he said, the ranchers and farmers, that is one of the toughest things. When you have a relationship with the ranchers, royalty owners, and then the water and the water with an ESG thing, they reclaim, clean the water and everything else. As a regulator with the Texas Railroad Commission, what are your thoughts on the water out there, right?
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:15:06] You know, that often is something that most people run for Railroad Commission doesn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. The ranchers and the farmers, you know, they’ve historically clashed with the Railroad Commission. Right. And they haven’t got a law on the Farm Bureau, doesn’t really get along with the Railroad Commission, and they’ve got reasons for that. They’ve got cattle ranchers, and they’ve got farmers whose voices aren’t heard often by the Bureau Commission. Right? You know, it’s my feeling that these railroad commissioners that we’ve been electing, most of them for the most part, are not there for all Texans. They’re only there for a certain segment of Texans, the people that work in the Big Oil and gas companies, not the small ones in the very big ones, you know. And we can’t continue on with that. That’s borderline crony capitalism on some of the stuff I’m witnessing out here. And as a conservative, that’s wasting money. It’s not good or bad for us. We’ve got to protect our water freshwater out here in West Texas, where I’m at, I’m in the desert. Out here in freshwater is like gold. You bet. Now, in Houston, it rains every other day, so you don’t really think about that. And in Austin, you’ve got a lot of money floating around there. You got all kinds of water. You know, it’s not that big of a concern on people’s front, front of their head, but out here you think about it every day. It’s incredibly dry out here. It’s incredibly dry out here. Oh yeah. So you have to have water to sustain life. A lot of Republicans, including myself, are pro-life. I want to see life flourish. If you don’t have fresh, clean drinking water, right? Not promote life. You cannot let life flourish. And so we have to protect that. And as a Christian, I want to continue doing that. I think it’s the right thing to do to protect freshwater for fellow Texans; I think it is the Christian thing to do.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:16:58] Yes. With the university lands, you know, if you’re not a Texan, you don’t really realize how much the university lands are used by oil companies. How is your relationship with them? The right, yeah.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:17:14] You know, there’s a lot of stuff that happens on the university lands that people don’t know about. I had a gentleman the other day who was shooting Howard’s helicopter. He landed out of my location. This guy’s a terrific guy out here. Everybody loves him. He’s like a local celebrity. He gets out of his helicopter and comes down and starts telling me stories about all this university land and all the problems. We have it on the surface, right? And the reason we have that is that there’s no public eye on it at all. Nobody has any idea what goes on out there unless you’re literally in a helicopter flying over it because it’s in the middle of nowhere, right? Or unless you’re working on the wells yourself and you’ve been hired to go do that work. So that’s the only way you would know about the stuff that goes on out there is if you’re actually checks and balances out there, really because there is no rancher. Cattle rancher, farmer there that’s responsible for that land. It is the state of Texas they’re supposed to be. That is our land, by the way. It’s not the people in Austin; it’s not their land. This is our land, that university land. This is our land. We have to make sure that when we operate oil and gas there, we do a good job. You know, we don’t need to curtail it by any means. We certainly don’t need to shut it down. If anything, we need to crank it up. Oh yeah. Well, we’re doing that. We need to be mindful of the land because they’re on that land is freshwater. We might need that freshwater one day, right? And oh yeah, probably will.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:18:52] Hey, I just want to add Tom as we go through this. When you say the guy was out shooting hogs out of a helicopter, there’s a real reason because the over the feral hog population is destroying the land, destroying the cattle. I mean, it is a real problem. So I just want to let everybody know that that is not just because he wants to. The feral, feral hog population is destroying all the other wildlife.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:19:22] When he does that, he is working for farmers and ranchers and really farmers because they get in there and they eat up the crops. Exactly. So, you know, he’s every time he goes out and shoots hogs, he’s he’s making farmers money. Yes, it’s not. This isn’t something he’s doing for the hell of it. This is something he does to help out his fellow farmers.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:19:42] Exactly. I just wanted to clarify that because folks who don’t
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:19:46] understand might not understand it. But if they come out here, I’d be happy to show them how it works.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:19:51] Oh, absolutely, because it is such a disaster in Texas that everybody thinks, you know unless you understand rancher farmers, feral hogs are a horrible problem. So and by the way, I had my color printer wasn’t working this morning, but I love your poses. I love everything that you got going on, and we will have you need on your website. You got a place to donate for you. And I really like the way that you’re standing up for Texas, and you’re not only standing up for Texas, you’re standing up for what I just heard, and I’m clarifying this. Anybody that’s a Texan, whether you’re new, where you’re from Austin, if you’re from anywhere, you’re for Texans, is that what I just heard?
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:20:41] Yeah, that’s correct. That’s correct. That’s correct. In the wind, the West Texas wind, as soon as you said that showed up at Cerebro and you see this wind behind me, it feels great out here this morning. It’s nice and cool and brisk, you know, and everybody in Texas, enjoy our environment. Texas has got this beautiful, amazing environment right. I mean, absolutely gorgeous environment out here. It’s so the scenery out here between Austin and Monahan’s when you’re driving out here. Just last night, it was just something like out of a movie. Every time I’m driving down I-10, when the Sun’s going down, and I come out to West Texas, I think more and more about it and how beautiful this land is and how I actually prefer to be out here. Oh yeah. In this wide-open space, you know, it’s it’s so gorgeous, and there’s so many great people out there that are really connected to the Earth. Yeah, but they haven’t separated themselves, like in the big cities and these big cities. They don’t understand the connection to the land and air out here. You will understand the connection to the land, and you’ll understand why while it’s important to protect it. And while it’s important to do everything we can to protect our industry as well. At the same time, because we’ve got to have the cash flow in Texas to run the show. It’s expensive. Texas is a big state, and we’ve been relying on oil and gas royalties for a long time. We have to continue that. That is part of our DNA. We are the energy. All of America, we are the energy capital of the world. Houston is the energy mecca of the world that’s not going to stop. But what needs to stop is what we do with our land and where we how we treat our ranchers and our farmers. A lot of that is going to have to come to a stop. We’re going to have to do a better job at that, and it starts right here. You start by electing me. You can get a slogan for Texas dot com, OK, web page drop in a small donation. I’d really appreciate it. Every little bit helps. But we really do want to help out Texans here. That is the goal to work for all Texans.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:22:48] You know, I’ve got a big passion for the disproportionately impacted communities. It seems like the high cost of power really get the poorer communities in the drive. And if you’re going to tell me that you’re going after keeping the power costs down and that you’re going to help, everybody in Texas is pretty strong,
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:23:11] that’s my message. You just nailed it. You know, I want to thank all Texans. I want us to have the most power supplier possible. I want us to have the most reliable sources of energy, and I want to do it the best way we can to produce the best image for our industry and for the state of Texas. We know we can. Texas can be number one in everything we choose to. We just have to put our minds to it, and it will be. But we have an agreement with leadership, and we need bold leadership. We need bold leadership. And Wayne, he’s just not going to get the job done. I’m sorry. It’s not going to happen. Well, it sounds like I think the puppy to standing on that. I think the public agreed with me on that. Wade’s got to go.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:23:50] I got to go. But I’ll tell you what I would love. We’re going to send this out. We’re going to put it out to all of our channels. And I’d like to stay in touch with you. And as you get through and any special announcements or anything, please let us know. We’d love to hear your side of anything that’s going on because being a Texan can. People don’t need to be burned in the fire, in their back to burn, you know, heat their house.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:24:15] So we shouldn’t have to go back to Texas in the 1880s. I enjoy Texas in the 1880s. Don’t get me wrong, you know, I could live just like this out there. All the fireplaces, we got four or five of them laying around here. But right? You know, that’s a lot of wood chopping. And I got phone calls to make, you know?
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:24:35] Oh yeah. Well, again,
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:24:39] we got to be able to turn the switch on whatever we need to, especially in our big cities. Yeah. You know, we can’t let down all of our voters. We can’t let down our constituents. We got to keep Texas red.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:24:51] You bet. And thank you very much for your time, and we do appreciate you.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:24:55] So thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it this morning. Hopefully, these two dogs over here haven’t been too loud,
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:25:02], but I’m a dog kind of guy.
Thomas Slocum, Candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner [00:25:05] All right. Well, thank you so much for having me.
