The Houston resident, now an energy litigator at Harrison, Bettis, Staff, McFarland & Weems LLP, said the position is the only elected post he plans to seek. “I have already signed a letter of resignation, if I am elected, I will give to a Republican official and tell him that, if I ever run for another office, he should give the letter to the governor – I’m out. I have stated publicly I will only be a Railroad Commissioner.”

As a Railroad Commissioner, he said he would go before the Texas Legislature and fight for funds for the agency and for the agency’s employees, even though the state is facing a budget shortfall. He sees the need to automate the agency’s entire system and eliminate as much paperwork as possible, which he said would allow the commission to shift resources to its field inspectors. “That would help oil companies drill wells, it would help them produce oil and natural gas, pay severance taxes and cut the budget deficit,” he said.

He also wants the commission to assume responsibility for monitoring air emissions from well sites, he said, saying he disagrees with the agency’s current position that air monitoring is the responsibility of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That dispute, he said, has created a vacuum that has allowed the federal Environmental Protection Agency to step in and try to regulate oil and gas operations in Texas, something he strongly opposes.

“I am wholeheartedly against the EPA getting involved in oil and gas operations,” he said. “They’re ham-fisted and will screw everything up. Regulation needs to be done by the Railroad Commission,” which he said understands how the oil and gas industry operates, knows what to look for and has the experience.

He also advocates developing Texas resources for use in Texas, including replacing out-of-state coal used in power-generating plants with Texas-produced natural gas.

Weems described himself as pro-business and fiscally conservative. A decades-long Republican who headed up student Republican organizations at Rice University and the University of Texas, he explained that he became concerned, beginning in the 1990s, that the Republican Party was too focused on what he termed splinter issues “as opposed to sound fiscal policy of strong jobs, a good economy and a low tax rate.” When his wife sought the Democratic nomination for Harris County Judge in 2002, he said he began talking with Democrats about his concerns. “In the Texas Democratic Party, fiscal conservatives are welcome and flourishing,” he said.

If elected, he said, he believes his party affiliation would help him lobby on behalf of the state industry by opening some doors in Washington, but he stressed that “the Railroad Commission has nothing to do with Washington, D.C.”

Not only does he bring his experience as a landman for Shell Western Exploration & Production to the campaign, he said, but his experience in oil and gas law.
“I know oil and gas law so well, I know that I only know about 20 percent of what I need to know,” he said. “The Railroad Commission writes regulations, it enforces regulations, it enforces laws. In my view, (a commissioner) needs that background.”

By Mella McEwen

Jeff Weems, who’s from Houston, spoke at the Midland International Airport to gain support.

He believes his 35-year-background and knowledge of the oil and gas industry will put him above his opponents.

Most of all, Weems says there are no political issues in the railroad industry, what matters is keeping the business strong.

The Railroad Commissioner’s position will be on the ballot in November.

Five recent former presidents of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association will endorse Democrat Jeff Weems in this year’s race for an open seat on the Texas Railroad Commission.

Three of the five have been generous contributors to at least two of the sitting Republican members of the commission and the other two have made campaign donations to at least one sitting Republican member. Several have also contributed to Democrats in the past, but none running for the Railroad Commission, according to the Ethics Commission website.

“I think that this shows that I have support that transcends party lines,” Weems told the Texas Energy Report this afternoon. His campaign plans a formal release of the names next week, he said.

The former TIPRO presidents backing Weems are: T.D. “Rusty” Howell, principal investor of Howell Oil & Gas; Austin oil and gas lawyer Rex White; Roger Plank, president of Apache Corp.; Scott Anderson, president of Anderson Oil; and J.R. Hurd, CEO of Hurd Enterprises.

Weems, an oil and gas lawyer from Houston, is running against Republican David Porter, a Giddings CPA whose practice includes several oil and gas clients in Midland and around the state. Porter defeated incumbent Victor Carrillo in the GOP primary last March.

Both candidates are aggressively courting both politically active members of the energy sector as well as rank-and-file workers in the industry. Weems, seeking to become the first Democrat elected to the commission since Bob Krueger won a seat in 1990, said he hopes the backing from the former TIPRO presidents will help him sever some of the traditional Republican ties to the industry.

Several of the former presidents have agreed to sign a fund-raising letter that Weems plans to send out to others in the oil and gas sector in the next week or two.

By John Moritz

“Water,” said the Democrat candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner.

Weems was in Cuero on Friday during a tour of South Texas and towns located in the Eagle Ford Shale area.

“Things are about to really, really ramp up in DeWitt County,” Weems said.

Even though he is against the Democratic-sponsored “Frac Act” that would give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over hydraulic fracturing, which is used in much of the drilling for natural gas in DeWitt County, Weems expressed great concern about the possible overuse of water by the companies using the process.

“They’ll use about 3 to 3 1/2 million gallons of fresh water on an individual frac job,” Weems said. “Once they release the pressure, the water flows back and it’s full of salt. It can be recycled, but it doesn’t have to be, right now. It’s more economical for the operators to just inject it usually 2,000 to 3,000 feet below the shale into a saltwater formation down there. There’s minimal pollution risk, but the problem is that water is gone from the water cycle.”

Weems, who has been an energy attorney in Houston for the past 19 years, also said he is staunchly against the “cap and trade” energy bill passed by the House last year. The bill’s intent is to create a market-based solution to regulate hydrocarbon emissions.

“The ‘cap and trade’ bill penalizes natural gas,” Weems said. “Natural gas is treated as the unwanted child and it bears most of the burden and gets none of the benefits from it. Natural gas burns so much cleaner than coal.”

Weems said as Railroad Commissioner, he would work toward Texas using natural gas to create jobs as power plants in the state would convert to using natural gas instead of other fuels such as coal brought in from outside the state.

“Then we can go to Washington, D.C., and tell them that their goals are admirable, but they can tell the folks in West Virginia what to do and let Texas handle Texas, because, quite frankly, we’re reducing our own carbon emissions by converting to natural gas at these power plants.”

Weems also said he would work toward making natural gas more of a transportation fuel.

“Let’s start helping service station owners install natural gas fueling outlets,” he said.

Weems, who considers himself a conservative Democrat, said he bought a Honda Civic NGV in Houston. The vehicle runs totally on natural gas.

“I told the salesman that I was running for Railroad Commissioner and I was going to put my money where my mouth is,” Weems said.

“I told him I wanted to drive it all across the state.”

“The salesman then told me he wouldn’t sell it to me. He said I’d get as far as Lampasas before I ran out of gas, literally. They’d have to tow me back to Austin because there are only 15 places in Texas outside of co-ops where the public can fill up.”

Weems said he wants to see Texas become more environmentally responsible so the EPA doesn’t have to come into the state without stricter regulations.

“The railroad commissioners need to get off their backsides and start doing their jobs, so the EPA doesn’t feel compelled to step in,” he said. “The railroad commission has exclusive authority to monitor, regulate and control hydrocarbon emissions from well sites, from compressor stations, from pipelines. But all three commissioners have thrown their hands up for 16 years and said, ‘We don’t do air.’ Well, sure they do. They regulate hydrogen sulfide, they regulate a lot of other air emissions, but they see this as a hot potato and they back away from it.”

Weems said his opponent, Republican David Porter, has not presented any new ideas during his campaign.

“I know the industry. I know what to do,” Weems said. “I have been in the industry fior 35 years. I have support from both the industry and from the people who are watching them like hawks.

“I have ideas. I know how to streamline the agency so that permits can be done faster and things can be done quicker. At the same time, I want the railroad commission to institute an immediate study on water reclamation, especially in areas like DeWitt County, because there just isn’t much water available.”

Weems said he has no intentions of becoming a career politician and has no other political ambitions. He claimed his complete focus would be on his job as Texas Railroad Commissioner.

“Cuero, DeWitt County and Texas need railroad commissioners who want to be railroad commissioners,” Weems said. “Two of the three commissioners now are running for the Senate. They are busy doing that and they are rarely in their offices. I’ve never run for office before and I won’t do anything else.”

The 51-year-old Weems, a partner in a Houston law firm, is the Democratic candidate for a spot on the three-member Commission which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry.

Although he was born in Lafayette, La. and currently resides in Houston, Weems proudly pointed to his long family history in Anderson County.

His dad, Roger, was “born in a farm house in Tennessee Colony,” while his grandfather, Olon, also lived in Tennessee Colony and worked in the oil fields locally for many years.

As a boy, Weems said he spent roughly two-thirds of his summers in Anderson County and the remaining time with his other set of grandparents in Rockport on the Gulf Coast.

The candidate joked that Tennessee Colony is “heavily populated” with Weemes or “near Weemes,” referring to relatives of his family.

His Anderson County memories are largely of “baling hay and going to rodeos with my grandfather,” he stated.

“It’s been fun coming here,” Weems said before Monday’s annual banquet of the Anderson County Democratic Women. “I’ve been meeting a lot of cousins.”

Weems said his son, Matthew, is a petroleum engineer, making him the fourth generation in his family to work in the industry.

Weems faces Republican David Porter, a certified public accountant from Giddings, in the Nov. 2 general election.

On Monday, Weems indicated the all-Republican Commission lacks leadership and needs to work harder to keep the oil and gas industry vibrant, while exercising “reasonable oversight.”

As an example, Weems said there is currently drilling taking place within the city limits of Fort Worth, pointing out the potential health risks.

“The Commission needs to step up and take charge,” Weems said. “It’s their responsibility to take charge of those areas.”

Weems also expressed his belief that the Commission should be promoting the use of natural gas rather than “penalizing it.

“Let’s use it,” Weems said. “Let’s power our power plants with it, instead of with coal we bring down from Wyoming. If we start replacing some of our gasoline with natural gas, gosh, it burns so much cleaner.”

Although saying the Commission is a non-partisan body, Weems said he is a former GOP member who actually headed a Republican student group while attending the University of Texas where he obtained both his undergraduate and law degrees.

“About 10 years ago, I realized the Texas Democratic Party was focused on sound economics and building good jobs more than the Republican Party,” Weems said.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, he said, were “more interested in splinter issues or wedge issues.”

For more on his campaign, visit www.JeffWeemsForCommissioner.com

In some ways, nothing seems out of the ordinary with this year’s race for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission.

One candidate never passes up an opportunity to tout his roots and experience in the energy industry, and mingles easily with the men and women who make their living in the business and remain active in the trade associations that protect their interests in Austin and Washington, D.C.

The other major-party candidate is less familiar with both the nitty-gritty details of the oil and gas industry and with the people who drive the industry’s agenda in the halls of government.

But in this year’s race, the industry back-slapper is running on the Democratic ticket and the outsider is a Republican.

History and conventional wisdom hold that Republican David Porter should be the odds-on favorite to defeat Democratic rival Jeff Weems in November.

Democrats have not won a statewide election since 1994. And in the 13 races for a seat on the Railroad Commission since 1988, Democrats have only won once.

Finally, virtually all of the pundits see 2010 as a strong Republican year because the economy remains relatively weak and President Obama’s popularity ratings, especially in Texas, remain anemic.

Despite all that, Weems, an oil and gas lawyer from Houston in his first race for elective office, appears remarkably upbeat.

At last weekend’s summer conference of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners in San Antonio, he received a warm reception from the members as he talked about his support for stepping up drilling for natural gas in Texas’ rich shale formations and for ending the deepwater drilling moratorium put in place in response to the BP blowout in the Gulf.

“You will find no stronger supporter of the oil and gas industry,” Weems told the members.

Porter, appearing before the same group, pushed to make the case that his 30 years of experience as an accountant for oil and gas industry clients gives him the insight needed to represent the energy sector on the three-member commission.

The job, he said, has enabled him “to serve as sounding board” for his clients in the industry. While Weems attempted to cast the Giddings Republican as out of his league on energy issues, Porter worked to link the Democrat with Obama and his party’s congressional leaders.

“They are fighting a de facto war on fossil fuels,” Porter said of the Democrats. “It will spell disaster for the state of Texas.”

For Weems to overcome the odds against him, he’ll need to draw a clear distinction in the minds of conservative and independent voters between him and the Obama Administration’s energy policies. At the TIPRO meeting and in interviews with the Texas Energy Report, he has tried to do just that by labeling both the deepwater moratorium and cap-and-trade initiatives as “wrong-headed and misguided.”

And he’ll also have to hope that statewide gains made by Democrats that were largely driven by the urban and large suburban counties between the 2002 and 2006 cycles continue this year despite the favorable outlook for Republicans.

Making cycle-to-cycle comparisons in Railroad Commission races is dicey because incumbency has played a significant role in recent role in recent years. This time, the seat is open because Porter ousted incumbent Victor Carrillo in the March primary.

In low-publicity down-ballot Texas Supreme Court races where neither major-party candidates were well known, the statewide Republican margin dropped from more than 580,000 votes in 2002 to just under 255,000 four years later.

In Dallas County, the Republican candidate in 2002 prevailed by about 12,000 votes. Four years later, the Democrat won the county by some 36,000 votes. In Harris County, the GOP down-ballot advantage was a comfortable 55,750 votes in ‘02. By ’06, the county was nearly a dead-heat with the Republican eking out a 4,800-vote advantage with overall turnout approaching 547,000 votes.

Weems sees an opportunity to chip away from otherwise reliable GOP votes in Tarrant and Denton counties because solid pockets of residents have expressed loud concerns that the Railroad Commission is not paying close enough attention to the issues related to urban drilling in the Barnett Shale.

Both counties remain comfortably in the Republican column despite dramatic gains by Democrats in recent cycles.

Porter says he has no intention of losing conservative voters who might be worried about the environmental impact of urban drilling.
“I know of no oilman who wants dirty air or dirty water,” said Porter, who is endorsed by current Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams and former Commissioner Barry Williamson. “I’m not going to cede the environment (issue) to the liberals.”

Weems promised soon to roll out a list of prominent supporters from the oil and gas sector who in recent elections have sided with Republicans. Still, a couple of Democratic and Republican consultants not active in the Railroad Commission race said that absent a dramatic development – or a massive influx of money for the Democrat – the race appears Porter’s to lose eight weeks before election day.

Here’s how one TIPRO member summed up the race after hearing both candidates make their pitch: “The Democrat really seems to know what he’s talking about. My only question is, can he win?”

By John Moritz

Copyright August 19, 2010, Harvey Kronberg, www.texasenergyreport.com

Jeff Weems, Democratic nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, today agreed with his opponent’s admission that the Republican lacks ideas, initiative and the desire to lead. These admissions came in a recently-published interview Porter had with the Texas Energy Report.

“I was surprised that my opponent came out and so clearly and proudly announced that the Porter Plan is to do nothing if he is elected,” Weems said. “This is what I have been saying for months – my opponent has no ideas or responses to the real issues before the Railroad Commission like air emissions, water usage and abandoned wells. In case he does not know, the Commission’s charge to protect correlative rights, and to provide oversight of the Texas oil and gas industry, does not mean sit behind the desk and gripe about Washington politics. Instead, the Commissioners need to lead by example and do things like fight for the workers at the Railroad Commission, especially in these tough economic times,” Weems concluded.

Porter’s admission of his intention to have taxpayers pay for his on-the-job training is especially bewildering when put into the context of the Sunset Commission’s current review of the Railroad Commission. “He must not be aware of the rumblings from legislators of both parties that the lack of activity by the Commissioners has led some to question whether Texas even needs a Railroad Commission,” Weems added. “If his plan is to do nothing, or to just do what Commissioners Williams and Jones tell him, then maybe those who say we only need one Commissioner are right,” said Weems, who has expressed his support for three commissioners for many reasons, including the innovations and sound policy that can result from public discussions among the commissioners. Weems also commented that his entire career is built upon building consensus with juries, so he does not foresee any problems with finding common ground with Commissioners Williams or Jones.

On a final note, in his interview Weems’ opponent stated, “I’m not aware of anybody asking us to debate,” he said. “If a credible organization does ask, we’ll consider it.” Weems noted this statement contradicted Porter’s handlers, who last week stated that there was no way the Giddings accountant would debate because Weems “is a litigator.” Regardless, Weems welcomes this first sign of electoral maturity in his opponent and respectfully requests any and all credible organizations in Texas to sponsor a debate or debates between the two. “This way,” Weems said, “the voters of Texas can see where the candidates stand and whether saying “Pass” is an acceptable response to a question about policy.

Weems, recognized as a 2007 Texas Super Lawyer in Energy and Natural Resources Law by Texas Monthly, is concentrating his campaign on ensuring Texas’ vibrant energy industry, protecting Texas’ environment, giving consumers a voice at the Commission, and restoring the good name and reputation of the Texas Railroad Commissioners.