Senator has long known energy is foundation of economy

Oil Editor




As a member of the Texas Senate, Kel Seliger serves on the Natural Resources Committee, which has allowed him to help pass several bills of importance to West Texas and the Permian Basin oil industry.


Among them are legislature ensuring that pipeline safety standards are in place for all construction work around pipelines and establishing a program to address abandoned or orphaned wells, including provisions for future declines in oil and natural gas prices.


"Kel Seliger has been a real friend to this industry," said Morris Burns, executive vice president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association. "Whenever he's in town, he always asks us what we need."


Born in Amarillo and raised in Borger in the Texas Panhandle, where the dominant industries are ConocoPhillips' refinery and J.M. Huber's oil and gas production operations, Seliger grew up with a familiarity of the oil, refining and plastics industries. He noted that the area is also dominated by the steel industry, which serves the oil and gas industry.


"We're all in the business," he said. "In Borger, the big businesses were Phillips and J.M. Huber, and when they did well the community did well."


While he is serving his first full term in the Texas Senate, he is also co-owner and executive vice president of Lake Steel Inc., a steel service center.


Growing up, he said, he learned the importance that a vital oil and gas industry has not only for West Texas but for Texas as a whole. Such insight into an industry so important to the district he serves has earned him the Hearst Energy Award for Government Service.


Energy, Seliger said during a recent visit to Midland, has been enormously important to the United States "since it was discovered in Pennsylvania" in 1859. In Texas, he said, it still comprises 9 percent of the state's economy.


Seliger and the other members of the Texas Legislature will be headed into special session April 17 to restructure the state's school funding system.


"I'm not certain the problem is a shortage of spending but excessive spending," he said. We should always look at our expenditures."


Those restructuring efforts include a revised business tax system that has prompted discussion about the future of the severance tax, paid on oil and natural gas production.


"The severance tax is unique to the oil and gas industry," Seliger said. "Companies that produce uranium, coal, clay, water, sulfur -- all are deriving wealth from those resources and not paying a severance tax."


He said he would like to see the severance tax taken into account as the state's business taxes are revised. In the budgetary process, he said, "you have to ask what part is reliable and what part is a windfall. One of the things we're going to see in the severance tax is that at some point, severance tax collections are going to start to decline and decline steadily."


He added, "My concern is with fairness and equity in the tax system, not just the size of the revenues generated."


Seliger went on to point out that the state has budgeted 40 percent of its revenues to fund health care, and education funding also comprises over 40 percent of the state's budget.


"That's about 90 percent of the budget and we still haven't addressed public safety or the environment," he said, cautioning that "we're looking at a budgetary crisis."


Education, he pointed out, won't cost less; the state will have to fund education efficiently and for more students.


As legislators gather in Austin in a couple of weeks, he said there will be a lot of answers from a lot of perspectives. But he called on everyone -- the energy industry, people with environmental interests, labor, small business owners, to come together and look at what is good for Texas.


The Legislature has also been drawn into disputes among oil and gas producers, land owners, pipelines, regulatory agencies and other parties impacted by oil and gas production operations.


"There are differences between" the entities, he acknowledged, adding that "there is nothing that cannot be addressed and nothing that's not being addressed."


While there are a lot of roles for the Legislature to play, he said, "it's important for legislators not to insert themselves into a situation but to come in as mediators."


Seliger, who won a special election in March 2004 to replace Teel Bivins, who resigned to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, won election to his first full term the following November. He and the other members of the Natural Resources Committee serve at a time when the state's energy industry is taking steps away from dependence on oil and natural gas to developing other sources of energy.


"We always need to be involved and dedicated to developing alternative sources of energy, whether it's wind or nuclear," he said.


In his District 31, Odessa is vying to obtain the federal FutureGen project, a $1 billion research project that includes a 275 megawatt power plant utilizing clean-coal burning technology with near-zero emissions. Andrews has teamed with the University of Texas of the Permian Basin to attract a High Temperature Teaching Test Reactor nuclear reactor, and Big Spring, McCamey and the Snyder areas are home to some of the world's largest wind farms.


"FutureGen has tremendous potential, not just for Texas but for the nation," he said.


FutureGen would also include sequestration or commercial use of the carbon dioxide produced by the gasification process and research into using the hydrogen also produced by the gasification as a fuel source and Seliger noted that UTPB professors are already doing extensive research into fuel cells.


In his travels through his district, which covers 26 counties, Seliger has found that as big and spread out as my district is, it's homogenous: The economic and environmental concerns are all the same."




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