In Episode 28 of The Energy Question, David Blackmon talks with Susan Combs about efforts to maximize Texas’s massive potential for carbon capture and storage.

Combs is a long-time public servant in Texas and at the Department of Interior in Washington who currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the Carbon Neutral Coalition (https://carbonneutralcoalition.com/) .

The mission of the Coalition is to promote policies that will help the state maximize the opportunity to be a global leader in the CCS space in the years to come.

Give it a watch. You’ll be glad you did.

 

DBE Podcast – The Energy Question Episode 26 – Susan Combs

 

David Blackmon [00:00:10] Hey, welcome to The Energy Question with David Blackman. I’m your host, David Blackman. And my very special guest today is Susan Combs, former Texas state legislator, agriculture commissioner in Texas and former state comptroller and who also served as assistant secretary for policy at the Interior Department during the Trump administration.   

David Blackmon [00:00:33] Susan is also today currently on the board of Advisors for the Carbon Neutral Coalition. We’re going to make that the topic of our discussion today. Susan, thank you so much for agreeing to do this with me.  

Susan Combs [00:00:46] Well, thank you, David. It’s great to be able to talk. You know, these zoom things were great for having a good discussion you can see people and it’s it’s very helpful to thanks.  

David Blackmon [00:00:55] It really is this technology is so miraculous to me and I guess it may be we can say it’s one of the very few positive things that evolved out of the COVID pandemic and all the crazy response our government had to that.  

Susan Combs [00:01:10] Yeah,.  

David Blackmon [00:01:10] So let’s get started. I want to talk to you about the [00:01:13]Carbon Neutral Coalition. [0.8s] And it’s I interviewed Sean Strawbridge on this similar subject last November. Sean, of course, is the CEO of the Board of Corpus Christi. First of all, talk about the Board of advisors for this coalition its so such an impressive board that I’m just thrilled with. Lauren Luxembourg got in touch with me last year to talk on this subject.  

Susan Combs [00:01:38] Well, Corey Robertson set it up and then he wanted to have a very diverse board, which I thought was really good. A because it gives you lots of viewpoints would be because you get this whole body of knowledge from people where you may not have known about pipeline to you may not write about storage or you may not have known about forestry.  

Susan Combs [00:01:58] So we had cattle raisers on there. We had the Farm Bureau on there. We have a former Supreme Court justice on there. We had Sean Strawbridge on in Corpus Christi. We have Ken Medlock from the Baker Institute at Rice. Well, know we have Chuck McConnell from U of H, who really has been very, very helpful.  

Susan Combs [00:02:19] We’ve got about 35 or 40. It’s very, very diverse and we split those into four committees. Their first one is [00:02:26]Carbon Capture Utilization Storage, and that is chaired by Elizabeth Coleman. [5.0s] She was a former railroad commissioner and then we have [00:02:34]methane we share by Will Robertson, who is Corby’s son and very knowledgeable. [3.7s] 

Susan Combs [00:02:38] We have [00:02:39]Offsets chaired by Jim Blackburn from the be Carbon protocol, which is housed at Rice. [7.4s] And then we have [00:02:48]Chuck McConnell who chairs the futures. [1.8s] And so we get a it’s a really large group and it is very diverse and we get lots of good input.  

David Blackmon [00:02:56] And then the coalition is there to advocate for strong policy, promoting Texas’s energy security and really the country’s energy security around these four main topics. Correct.  

Susan Combs [00:03:10] And the underlying principle is that what Corby said was, look, we want to get Texas to being carbon neutral by 2050, comma. And in order to get there, what you have to do is you have to have a carbon capture market. You have to have a robust environment to make that happen. And with all the stuff coming from Wall Street and all the stuff coming through the administration, there’s a kind of a chill in the air.  

Susan Combs [00:03:34] So what we’re adding more are incentives and one on property tax. If you do some pollution control and you get a property tax franchise tax and then one on per the Texas emissions reduction plan, which has been for vehicles and we want to expand that.  

Susan Combs [00:03:51] And then this one about liability, the Texans for Lawsuit Reform Foundation took a look at the liability issues and beyond that was sort of doing like which, you know, you’ve got energy podcast, we’re doing videos and we’re doing OP Ed’s and we’re doing things like this and we’re writing and we keep tweaking the website. 

Susan Combs [00:04:14] What has been interesting to me is the fact that there’s not much volume of information or speech or advocacy coming from some of the people who are the big players in the industry. And they really have a lot of things to talk about in a very positive way. So we’re trying to amplify that kind of megaphone it because we think it’s so important.  

David Blackmon [00:04:34] Well, you know, it is very important and it’s such an enormous opportunity when you really look at, for example, the carbon capture piece of this, the amount of poor space available to house the captured carbon and along the Texas and the Louisiana Gulf Coast is really the majority of the available opportunity in the country, isn’t it?  

Susan Combs [00:04:58] Yes. And in fact, the General Land office also has land under water and they’re very interested and engaged. And we just got a bill filed to help Texas Parks and Wildlife to. Just got that filed on Tuesday afternoon to let them actually engage in this.  

Susan Combs [00:05:14] There is a large project coming, and this is to your point about the Texas Gulf Coast. There’s a group that wants to invest $500 million over an unspecified number of years to do what I would call sort of living landscapes, see on a sea, on an on the ocean gulf for 250 miles of Texas’s coast in parks and while it has about 60 miles on that and it’s a short bill, two page bill and, you know, I truly hope it happens.  

Susan Combs [00:05:43] Because with the coastline itself, the underground storage underwater, the underground caverns under places like, you know, these large South Texas ranges. Right. Many, many vehicles. We also have a lot of pipelines. Which is so ironic. Think about the Ohio railroad disaster and the railroads.  

Susan Combs [00:06:04] And there’s a I’m going to read you this it was on Monday, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Hall, Mender, she specifically said that pipelines were a whole lot safer than railroads in transporting stuff.  

Susan Combs [00:06:21] And I thought, go, Jennifer, I mean, on first name terms with a but go Jennifer, because I thought yes, that you’ve been saying. And so I was talking to Chuck McArdle about this and he’s a great guy you ought to get him on your program.  

Susan Combs [00:06:34] Chuck was pointing out that you have all of the federal FERC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which should be saying, yes, we just get these pipelines. You’ve got the Senate in uproar today grilling these poor guys looking like, you know, deer in the headlights.  

Susan Combs [00:06:51] If you’re going to do carbon capture, you have to extract it or capture it. You have to move it. You got to dump it, you got to abuse it and we need to be promoting more pipelines. They’re safer.  

David Blackmon [00:07:02] Well, that’s right. And, you know, I wish she’d have spoken up on the first day that the Biden administration when the president canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and as a result were bringing all that crude in from Canada on trucks and trains.  

David Blackmon [00:07:16] But it’s good to know the administration seems to be evolving in view. Yeah, we’re recording this during Ceraweek. And one of the things I’ve been gratified to see, number one was some [00:07:28]positive comments about the industry from Energy Secretary Granholm on Wednesday. [4.1s] And then the [00:07:34]second thing is a very robust discussion at Ceraweek now about cars and the future for CCS. [7.7s] 

David Blackmon [00:07:42] And it’s it’s just such a natural fit. I’ve always viewed this as high potential for the oil and gas industry because it’s such a natural fit with the current expertise these companies have on staff, isn’t it? It’s really phenomenal.  

Susan Combs [00:07:57] Well, and it’s in their best interest, especially when you have an offset credit market and then if you capture that, you can use some of this captured CO2, you know, for cement and plastics and various other things. So you can have an end game.  

Susan Combs [00:08:11] And one of the things that Chuck has been talking about, McConnell futures market, is, look, we decided to name it the futures I’m sorry, the Futures Committee is that it’s not going to be, you know, confined to hydrogen.  

Susan Combs [00:08:23] And we have about almost 900,000 energy-related jobs in the state of Texas. And I’ve got a number that says, you know, if we get to 16 U.S. and we get to see these various things, we would expect annual new jobs of 18,350 over a 15-year period, comma and then about 9200 plus for ongoing operations.  

Susan Combs [00:08:46] So to that end, the Texas Workforce Commission has set aside $38 million into what they were doing, sort of this middle-skills arena where you going to have these new technologies, new things needed and you got it. You have a skills gap.  

Susan Combs [00:09:01] And so they’re right there. Chairman is a very smart guy named Bryan Daniel, and I think he’s going to be advocating this session and they know he can’t lobby, but they’ll be talking about what’s the gap.  

Susan Combs [00:09:13] And I think I think Chuck and the New Age people are very convinced that there’s a really robust opportunity for Texas to grow and expand as we are as we transform. That’s the word I prefer, as we transform and expand our opportunities to do all kinds of good things for the state and me. I mean, look what she’s doing. He’s global. Sean Strawbridge He’s doing things locally. Yeah.  

David Blackmon [00:09:39] What’s happened at the Port of Corpus Christi since John got there is one of the most incredible economic development stories in the state’s history. And frankly, it doesn’t get enough attention. But yes, I completely agree with you.  

David Blackmon [00:09:54] That port, that specific port is so critical because of its proximity to the Eagle Ford and the Permian Basin is such a crucial driver of our energy abundance in the United States. And it’s all going through. It’s Kristie. It’s it’s it’s really fantastic story.  

Susan Combs [00:10:12] Speaking of Sarah, I listened to the guy yesterday who is German, but he’s in the commodities market, a guy named Lars Shani Cowen, C-H-E-R-N-I-K-A-U. And he’s written a book called Unpopular Truth. And he points out because we were he was talking about the fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal.  

Susan Combs [00:10:30] And then you’re going over to the renewables and he had these very interesting maps of where the sun is not shining, ain’t going too much and where the wind doesn’t blow much and gone up and that it is a kind of a failed analytical exercise to say, oh, we’re going to go from three or 4% global to 40%.  

Susan Combs [00:10:50] Because the natural environment doesn’t do that. It was just it was just very interesting. Just he’s he was sort of frustrated. He said, if I talk to one person, I can get him to talk to me. But if it becomes clouds, cloud and crowd speak, it’s all negative.  

David Blackmon [00:11:05] Right? Right. What’s the name of the book again? I’m going to have to talk.  

Susan Combs [00:11:08] It’s unpopular truth.  

David Blackmon [00:11:10] Unpopular truth.  

Susan Combs [00:11:11] So again, Lars and I think he’d get a red shirt, a cow. He’s German.  

David Blackmon [00:11:15] Okay. Okay. I’m going to look.  

Susan Combs [00:11:16] And he’s very, very interesting. The charts are unbelievable.  

David Blackmon [00:11:20] Well, it is. And, you know, a great example of what you’re talking about is Great Britain, where they’re building all this offshore wind and they’re not really in a fair way, which is really prime location for wind and it’s going to be just billions and billions of dollars invested. And in an energy kind of boondoggle that isn’t going to produce much industry.  

David Blackmon [00:11:42] And what we saw just this week, them having to reactivate old retired coal plants just to keep the lights on because wind had dropped to almost nothing on a couple of days over there. So all of this is so there’s so much waste happening in the energy space.  

Susan Combs [00:11:59] And and think about the cost by the consumer. I mean, we talk at the carbon neutral coalition is affordable, reliable, you know, dispatchable energy. And if it’s not dispatchable and if it’s not affordable, then when in some sense you’re going to see people’s living standards actually decline. Yeah. And that’s yeah, that’s very sad.  

David Blackmon [00:12:20] And we’re really even in danger of that happening in Texas if we don’t get some more dispatchable backup generating capacity on our own grid. And I hope the legislature will deal with that in this session.  

David Blackmon [00:12:31] But I know you’re working on the coalition is working with Representative Drew Darby, the great proponents of oil and gas industry, really over the last two decades in the legislature on on a bill this session. Talk about what that bill would do.  

Susan Combs [00:12:48] Yeah his is House bill 1158 and it really is to getting support for clean energy projects. And there’s another bill that got filed by Representative Landreth, which is about what I would call a property tax exemption for certain things. And so these two are sitting out there and Drew Darby is wonderful. He’s great to us out of San Angelo and Lang Graff is out of Odessa. They really get it that you going to have to have some things to incent the market.  

Susan Combs [00:13:24] So what Corbett is talked about is if you have if you’re carbon capture for a ton is, you know, 130 bucks, 125 and if you get a federal the 45 Q If you get $85 when you close that gap, it used to be 50, but you still at the state level because you do have this sort of looming presence from Wall Street and a looming presence from the feds, the present feds that say Don’t invest.  

Susan Combs [00:13:49] And I talked to friends of mine in Midland they say that the credit market has dried up. So what we’re trying to do with these bills is one we’re looking at also was a franchise tax bill, another one about a liability base. We have these here, but it’s meant to sort of say to all these people, we want to help you. We think this is important. And I think that Bill, Representative Lang Graham and Representative Darby are going to get good hearings on their bills.  

David Blackmon [00:14:12] Good, good. Well, that’s that’s very positive. I really like the incentivized way to go about this, rather than forcing taxpayers to foot the bills for direct subsidies to go, the incentive route seems to make a whole lot more sense.  

David Blackmon [00:14:27] And, you know, it’s something that the state of Texas has been good at doing historically in the energy space, even with wind energy, you know, we’ve incentivized that we’re the great wind energy power in the United States and Texas today.  

David Blackmon [00:14:41] Another story that doesn’t get enough attention but anyway, this is also positive. And let’s talk about energy security. I don’t understand. And I wonder if you have some insights on why the climate lobby has such a hard time learning the very clear lessons that have that Europe has shown us over the last year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  

David Blackmon [00:15:06] And how Europe has had to scramble. In this mad rush to secure liquefied natural gas cargoes from the United States and elsewhere to meet its just basic energy needs doesn’t at all stem from the fact that they didn’t have energy security in the first place.  

Susan Combs [00:15:22] Well, they had a weird energy security mainly. They were beholden to Russia if you have, you know, Germany having 40% of its energy from their neighbor to the right. And if their neighbor starts barking at you.  

Susan Combs [00:15:36] You want to back away from the teeth? Well, that’s what happened when they all took a look. And, you know, the prior Mrs. Merkel, she was very much in favor of close, close, close ties with Russia. She was born in East Berlin and right over there.  

Susan Combs [00:15:50] And so her background was different. England just made mistakes. And they had they got captured by the climate lobby. But when Ukraine’s nuclear reactors were under assault, when his country was under assault, when it didn’t have lights, all of a sudden the Baltic states, you know, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania took a look and said, oh, my goodness. And then you have Finland, which has always been steering, you know, in that direction in Sweden.  

Susan Combs [00:16:14] They realized that the Europe that they knew was gone and was not coming back. And so they said, we have made a mistake, we have imperiled our citizens. And I would suggest to you that you’re not hearing much from the climate lobby at this time, saying we’ve got to go back to wind. They’re not saying it because it’s not reliable, it’s not affordable and it’s not dispatchable.  

Susan Combs [00:16:35] And so I think it’s been an extraordinarily important lesson, and I think that we’re paying attention to it here. We had winter storm Uri, which is sort of our own version of, you know, Russia and a Russian cold front. But it taught us something. And my husband and I are taking a look at maybe getting a generator.  

Susan Combs [00:16:53] We’ve got one at the ranch. We had backup energy we had it for all of the ranch now for 40 years because things happen, you know, and I think what Europe has told a lot of us is you got to watch out. You’re going to have to do it.  

Susan Combs [00:17:07] So Estonia is developing an LNG plant. Spain is developing an LNG facility because they want to get that on top of the Mediterranean so they can move energy around, which I think is great.  

David Blackmon [00:17:18] So I know in the Trump administration you guys understood how important energy security is to national security. And I know you’ve probably been following the events at Ceraweek. It seems to me we’re having a bit of an evolution in the administration’s posture towards the oil and gas industry, particularly from Senate from Secretary Granholm.  

David Blackmon [00:17:44] But John Podesta was also there and also made a couple of remarks that indicated an understanding of the need to maintain energy security. And I wonder if you’re seeing a similar dynamic taking shape in the in the current administration.  

Susan Combs [00:17:59] Yeah, I think so. I think Senator Manchin coming out to oppose a nominee for the assistant secretary, you know, ACL and Landon management. Right, Laura Daniel Davis, because of a leaked sub memo which said even though this will give us better security, we won’t do it. And that was just a mind-blowing thing for my agent.  

Susan Combs [00:18:22] And that’s gotten a lot of play and he’s saying it is national security. If you can’t turn on your lights, you can’t have the heart-lung machine working in a hospital. You can’t do any of that. You put yourself in a very bad way. And I was surprised when just some months ago the administration allowed I forget which big player to go ahead and deal with Venezuela.  

Susan Combs [00:18:43] Venezuela’s a particularly reliable world player but when you have Iran and Venezuela and other places saying it’s okay to do this, Russia’s been, you know, made a pariah, which is fine. But it is important if we have the Cole, when is Europe was very lucky not to have very Cold War. Supposedly it had really, really cold winters.  

Susan Combs [00:19:04] It certainly all this is certainly prompting Finland to say overwhelmingly, we want to be in NATO, we want better support, we’re going to go west we don’t trust east and I’m hoping that the administration is truly paying attention to it.  

David Blackmon [00:19:15] I do, too. I you know, I talk with Dan Yergin, you’re going to about a month ago, and he was very focused on the likelihood that Europe did get through with this mild winter this time. But it’s still going to have a real problem obtaining the the oil and natural gas it needs to get through the next to not just next winter, but the one after that as well the way things are shaping up.  

David Blackmon [00:19:38] And it just all goes back to that fact that they you know, that it had become so overreliant on Russia for its energy needs and I you know, here in the United States, the shale revolution really helped us become much more energy independent than we were.  

David Blackmon [00:19:54] And carbon capture this CCS just seems to be a way to help us clean up, get the emissions out of our current system that we know has worked for a century. It just all seems to. Makes so much sense. Really,.  

Susan Combs [00:20:09] I think. And I think that’s the important story we can have an energy secure future comma if we go ahead and clean it up. What I find interesting, though, is that some people on the left would say the only good fossil fuels, a dead fossil fuel. I mean, that’s you know, they really if it’s if it’s cleaned up, it’s still not good.  

Susan Combs [00:20:28] And I view that is being very anti folks on a limited income that we really do need to pay attention to who are not in you know they’re not riding around in fancy cars. But it is almost either or.  

Susan Combs [00:20:45] I mean, I really I’m on all of the above energy person. I’ve got solar on the ranch and got wind on the ranch. I’ve got, you know, generator on the ranch. I’ve got I’m I have all of those, which is great and all of the above.  

Susan Combs [00:20:56] But I would never say if you cleaned up fossil fuels, it’s still awful. Awful. That would be that would be wrong. Incorrect but also, it’s a bad public policy. It’s a terrible policy.  

David Blackmon [00:21:07] Yeah, it really is and for Texas specifically, we’re so rich and the resource. Doesn’t Texas produce more than half the oil and gas, the crude oil produced in the whole country right now? Yeah,.  

Susan Combs [00:21:20] We’re we’re one of the major ones, obviously, and we have been very supportive. You were right next door in Louisiana. You’ve got, of course, the Dakotas, you’ve got Haynesville, but you’ve got California, which has one of the largest reserves of gas, but they import about two-thirds of it because they won’t go get it.  

David Blackmon [00:21:37] That’s crazy a lot of that comes from Venezuela. In fact, a lot of the gasoline they use. So but yeah, so one of the things I also want to talk about real quick is when you were at the SEC, at the Interior Department, you did a lot of work, had a big focus on Alaska and ensuring, you know, Alaska was able to continue to exploit the resource that they have up there with this Willow project of Conoco Phillips coming up for approval. I wonder if you if you have an opinion on which way that should go.  

David Blackmon [00:22:15] Oh, I think it should be done. I mean, Senator Murkowski and Senator Sullivan are clearly pro Alaska and they’re not polluters. They want to do it right. They want to say the Alaska does need it. And I think that the administration, through their nominees, are showing that they really are going to be pretty hard core.  

Susan Combs [00:22:33] This was a road that Senator Murkowski wanted about four years ago. And then Sally, Secretary Sally Jewell said, no, no, no, the birds are more important than humans who can’t get them out.  

Susan Combs [00:22:43] There’s there was in those two administrations in the Obama administration, and then in this one, there is a lack of interest in humans. Yeah, that’s kind of surprising to me. I mean, the interior is natural resources. It’s a lot of things. It’s a lot of land.  

Susan Combs [00:22:59] But these are life saving things. If you can get energy reliably, safely dispatching related people, then they have a better life. They can absolutely make their lives better.  

David Blackmon [00:23:08] Yeah, we’re talking about potentially 180,000 barrels a day of production. That’s that’s a lot of oil to help refill the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. That is only about 40% capacity right now. So I hope that decision goes the right way.  

David Blackmon [00:23:24] We are running up against time. I can’t thank you enough for doing this. I want to before we go, though, be sure everyone knows where they can find the Carbon Neutral Coalition. Talk about where they can go to get more information on what y’all are doing.  

Susan Combs [00:23:38] Okay. Debbie Debbie Debbie. A Carbon Neutral Coalition dot com and is Corbett Corbin Robertson is the head I’m the chair of the advisory board and we’ve got updated podcasts, updated videos, updated things.  

Susan Combs [00:23:54] And one last thing that we’re doing, Dave. We are actually engaged extensively in social media right now to get people in the capital to understand what’s going on. We’ve got a couple of hundred thousand clicks and people like this back and forth so we’re trying to do an all of the above media, but it is the Carbon Neutral Coalition.  

David Blackmon [00:24:13] Fantastic. And before we go to I just want to thank you again for all your service to Texas. I have such a great admiration for people that put themselves out there, seek election to these important offices. And I, as somebody who worked in that part of the world for 20 years, I understand the sacrifices that you have to make to do that. So thank you again for your service to Texas.  

Susan Combs [00:24:37] Well, thank you, Dave. It’s been a pleasure to be on here and especially seeing the artwork in your office.  

David Blackmon [00:24:42] Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And that’s all for this episode. Thank you. Thanks to viewers for joining us. And we will see you next time.  

 

Link to the Susan Combs LinkedIn: Here

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