The Texan Podcast - Railroad Commission Candidate Jon Rosenthal on Texas Energy, Oil and Gas

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

State Rep. Jon Rosenthal, this year's Democratic candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, joined The Texan's Reporter Isaiah Mitchell to discuss his campaign for statewide office.Rosenthal touched on the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, subsidies for renewable energy, data centers, his Republican opponent, Bo French, and more.Listen to more interviews from The Texan wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, follow us and leave a review.

Howdy, everybody. This is Isaiah Mitchell with the Texan News. I'm joined today by State Representative John Rosenthal. He represents a portion of the Houston area in the Texas House. And this year, he is running as the Democratic nominee for Railroad Commissioner. We're going to talk a little bit today about the importance of the Railroad Commission, about the job of the agency and how it's one of the most misunderstood agencies probably in the Texas government. And we're also going to talk a little bit about the role of energy policy in this year's midterms on, as it pertains to concerns that a lot of voters have on their minds this year, and specifically with regard to the Permian Basin Reliability Plan. So Representative Rosenthal, it's good to see you. Thanks for joining us today. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I woke up grateful and alive, grateful to be alive. So thank you for having me on the show today. Wonderful. So to start off with, maybe you could just talk a little bit about the Railroad Commission and what it does, because polls showed that a lot of voters aren't really familiar with the agency. Exactly.

And thanks for that question. The Railroad Commission might be the most important agency that most people have never heard of. Because when you hear that name, you think of trains, but it has nothing to do with transportation or trains. The Railroad Commission of Texas regulates the oil and gas industry in our state, which is the backbone of the Texas miracle economy. It's the beating heart of our energy infrastructure. The agency itself has a thousand, roughly a thousand full-time employees, half a billion dollar biennial budget, give or take, and is such a central part of our energy infrastructure, our economy, and even our Texas culture.

It's a dramatically important job. And today I'm going to talk particularly about the Permian Basin Reliability Plan. Now, this is a plan. It's got a lot of facets, but it's a state plan to, among other things, build high voltage transmission lines that would span the state and link energy production in the central and eastern portals of the state to supply industrial activity primarily in West Texas in the Permian Basin. And the Permian Basin is a major oil field, a lot of oil production that goes on in the Permian Basin, and that's one big component of the electrical load that the state expects to grow

on the state grid and in that area. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the Permian Basin Reliability Plan and just give us your overall opinion. Sure. The heart of the plan, like you said, is the 765 KV transmission line. So without getting in the weeds about electrical transmission, And this is, this is that the premise for the plan comes out of a report that was done by Urquot, where they suggested that transmission capability was one of our central core issues in the state of Texas. And at the risk of sounding terse, you know, if you are concerned about having a rickety power grid where we, I find an embarrassment that we're the energy capital. of the entire world here, and people still have to hope and pray the power stays on every time the winter storm moves in. So part of this is an address to the issues around the winter

storm and the reliability of our power grid. So from the very beginning of this campaign, actually in my time in the legislature, I've been a fierce advocate to upgrade our energy infrastructure. So a big piece of that's going to be transmission. Now, the story, of this plan is after the Erkot report, we took it up in the legislature. It was Charlie Gehrin on the House side that authored the bill, and it was Charles Schwartner, I think, on the Senate side, who was the sponsor. This legislation passed through your legislature, which obviously is Republican majority legislature, nearly unanimously in both the House and the Senate, even the Senate amendments now for people that do inside baseball sort of political stuff, know that the joke that

we have in the legislature is it's not, you know, if you're in the Texas House or Representatives, the enemy isn't R versus D, it's the Senate. That's the problem. So even when the Senate amendments came over on the conference report, nearly every representative in the House voted for that too. So at the time, we all agreed upgrading energy infrastructure was a good idea. Now, I suspect in this conversation we'll talk a little bit more about the brass tax of how that plays out in real life because one of the things I feel like I have learned in my time in the legislature is it ain't like being an engineer. So for folks that don't know me, I'm a career mechanical engineer.

And when you work in that world, you need stuff to work in real life. legislators, I think, sometimes care more about how it looks than how it works. And I'm just here to tell you, if you want to succeed as an engineer in this industry or any other, your stuff has to work. And if it don't, you won't advance. And if it does, you know, people like you. So I'm proud to say that most of my stuff I've ever designed still working today, even decades later. But back to the matter at hand. So we all decide it's a good idea to upgrade transmission infrastructure in the state of Texas because that's a failing of our energy grid.

Now, when you want to do that, you have to run power lines across the state. And these aren't the little ones that are buried in your neighborhoods where cables might be this big. This is big fat pieces of wire on huge towers out. I'm sure everyone's familiar. If you drive across our beautiful state, you see this stuff in the landscape. So that's become a huge political battle. And it's not left versus right. Once again, it is folks who are concerned about their communities and their land and what is going to be the impact to the citizens in the state beyond the notion that we need better transmission.

So that is a delicate balance to achieve. And that's where we find ourselves right now with the grassroots movement, opposing this where it was hugely popular in the legislature during the session. A lot of the critiques of the plan seem to boil down to the claim that the legislature authorized the state agencies to conduct analyses or examinations, and the state is moving quickly forward with implementation. And so I guess the first thing I would ask you is, do you think, in your opinion, that the plan adequately studied the possibility of more local generation in the Permian Basin rather than piping and electricity from other portions of the state? Actually, I kind of agree with the criticism. Although, to be fair, the language of the legislation doesn't really address that. And most legislators, and I'll just be honest, me included, we're going off the recommendations of Rekot who does this stuff. for a living and does these sorts of analyses.

Now, if people are critical because they're not, they feel like this plan did not address the possibility that the energy is going to becoming, that the electrons are going to be generated at the Permian Basin instead of a different part of the state and moved to the oil patch. These, you know, transmission lines carry power both ways. So if you're, they've just, so the story behind this for everybody, listening is they've just broken ground on what could be the largest gas-fired electrical generation facility in the state of Texas out in the Permian Basin area. And so they're

going to be generating some new electricity out there. And if you've got these transmission lines in place, the wire itself does not care which direction the electrons flow. You could end up carrying power back into the state from the Permian Basin, if that's what you have to do. The infrastructure around the run of the really big heavy piece, you would have to change on both sides because it goes from the source and it necks down farther and farther through, you know, the transmission network and eventually knock down through transformers to the point where it's in your neighborhood or your stores or your businesses. So that part of transmission infrastructure might have to change if you want to reverse the flow. but having solid transmission infrastructure in this state is going to be helpful no matter where we're trying to move electrons around. It will be beneficial to us just to be able to move it.

Think about it this way. If we were able to move water freely in this state, we could take the areas that flood and move the water to areas that are in drought right now. Corpus Christi wouldn't be in such a horrible mess if we could do that. So this is kind of like that. It's a little easier to move electricity than water, but I think strengthening our energy infrastructure is a good goal for all of us.

This is a bit of an overlapping question, but do you feel that the plan sufficiently evaluated separation between generation resources and Permian Basin area electrical load? I don't know if that. I'm not sure I quite agree with the framing of the question. But to be fair, upgrading the infrastructure is important no matter which direction you're going to flow. And while it may, this plan was developed before, I think they broke ground on this facility.

But I do believe the plans were already in the works. They just didn't know what the scope and scale of it was until they started, you know, getting permits for the different kinds of construction they're going to need out there. So I do think, you know, the concept. of it was included, but there was no way they could be in possession of all the details. So before actually breaking ground on this part of it, they should understand the implication of the new power generation in the Permian Basin because that is going to be a significant bump in our resources.

It's something we desperately need is to generate as much electricity as we can in this state. Because for the folks that live in the same state as me and maybe this podcast reaches folks in other states, Texas runs dangerously close to the limit of our capacity in some extreme energy-requiring situations like, we're probably built better for heat than we are for coal, but like I said, anytime there's a major winter storm, we still have vulnerabilities there. And we should have, and with the influx of population and the development of new industry here, our demand is quickly outstripping our supply, and so we need to generate as much as we can. Would you agree or disagree with another critique, the claim that subsidies have distorted

the energy market? So this is an interesting question, because sometimes people ask this question, or assert that subsidies distort the market to favor renewables and carbon capture and technologies like that, which I suspect is where this question comes from you today. Others say government subsidies or government policies are designed to give unfair advantage to the oil and gas industry. And so I'm just going to say there's some may be true. Those things are not mutually exclusive. And it is true that subsidizing any portion of a market does influence how the market moves. I mean, that objectively makes sense to me.

I actually believe in my heart of hearts we should encourage all forms of energy development in the state. We are at our best when we have a healthy energy portfolio that includes sort of an all-of-the-above approach to energy generation. And sometimes people forget renewables include stuff like geothermal, hydrogen energy, and those build on oil and gas technology. So we already, we're such a prime state for this kind of development of those emerging technologies because we have the know-how. We are the best in the world at that stuff here in Texas. And so we should encourage all the above, whether it's subsidies or policies that help them, you know, encourage them to start new energy starts or new drilling. Like, I know you haven't asked this question, but in the position that we're in right now, don't you wish we were, even less reliant on foreign forms of energy.

And so for American energy independence, for Texas dominance in this market, we should be doing all the above mostly because we can and also because if we want to remain the energy capital of the entire world, it's on us to make sure that we forward all these technologies. Yeah, when you talk about that, are you imagining more equivalent subsidies or more equivalent deregulation. What kind of approach are you thinking of? That's a good question. So, and I hadn't really thought about it in those terms. It's a really astute way to put it. So incentives might be subsidies, but they also, we can encourage folks in other ways, right? So if you're talking about deregulation, when we talk about what the Railroad Commission's

role is, you know, sort of more specifically, I think we can incentivize their operators who are responsible. I think in the long run, it benefits all of us to have people that bring the energy of the world that provide jobs for literally millions of hardworking Texans. I often encourage people to go into oil and gas like I did. You make good money. It's a great field in this state. But we want to encourage those operators to do things right,

because if they are going the extra mile to follow the rules and be profitable, stay within the bounds of the law, be responsive to communities and good stewards of the environment, which by and large most of our operators are, if we allow the sort of fly-by-night folks who routinely rack up violations, skirt corners, even disband their corporations when they get a lot of violations to avoid responsibility, we don't want them to have the unfair advantage of not being held accountable when they skirt the rules. So to make this move forward, I actually strongly feel we should have streamlined permitting processes and even reduced costs for those folks who have demonstrated a good record, or even if they have the occasional violation, the Railroad Commission in Texas should be helping our partners succeed. We should be working with these operators to make sure they're profitable, bringing energy,

providing good jobs for our Texans and operating within the rules. It should be, we shouldn't be, we should be encouraging the good guys and discouraging the fly-by-nine operators that are taking advantage of lax rules. Well, speaking of incentives, in some ways, the Permian Basin Reliability Plan reminds me of the plan to create competitive renewable energy zones. And this was finally implemented back in 2014, so it's been a little while. I have a hard time. That was 12 years ago. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on competitive renewable energy zones and whether you agree with the claim that they have increased transmission costs for rate payers. So first, you're asking about something that happened before I got into government and I was still doing offshore, mostly deep water, oil, and gas.

But I remember this stuff. And the upside is it improved our energy infrastructure. And the downside is the people of the state had to pay costs for this. I would say the same thing has happened to us after Winterstorm Muri. I don't know if you all are aware that we now have a subsidization, what is it called, a securitization surcharge on our electric bills. The average household pays an extra $40 a month on the economic kit that we took after this massive winter storm. So it's a tradeoff.

there's no question that it increased transmission costs because we're paying for the infrastructure. But at the same time, if you want to build that infrastructure, someone has to pay for it. Now, the real question you get to is, should it be the citizens of Texas, or should it be the operators and the industries that make the profit off of that infrastructure? Well, just to pivot to a very hot topic right now, some of the demand that's expected in the pipeline comes from data center developers. So I'd love to hear what you think the Railroad Commission's role

should be in addressing data center development since it intersects a lot with power with the oil and gas industry and just with the use of land of the Permian Basin. Yeah, no kidding, right? And it's funny because the Railroad Commission of Texas has very little direct interaction

with the permitting for these things. And I'll get to this in just a second, but I get literally every place I go. It's one of the first questions I get asked. Well, what about data centers? If we're going to invite this massive piece of industry with the revenue that it brings and the industry that it is into our state, we need to appropriately manage this.

So I have actually been in favor of if we're going to do it, And I'm not pro or against data centers. I've been in government long enough to know that, no matter whether it's good, bad, or indifferent big money interests often gets their way in your state government. For better or for worse, the legislature of this state and the executive branch too significantly served big money interests. It's the main of my existence. But given that, we can also. appropriately manage these things. So let's say we, the governor can call us into a special session.

You know, I'm campaigning around this state running for office. It's an incredibly busy time for me, as you can imagine. I'll drop all of it tomorrow. If the governor calls us to Austin, I will go there and we can do some rules on these data centers, the first of which needs to be, they will be held accountable to a resource management plan that has to be filed and documented before they even start, and it can't just be words on paper. It has to be something they're held accountable to. What I mean by that is, if you need a huge amount of electricity that we can't generate, show me your plans to generate the electricity. And I don't want you just to generate the minimum amount for yourself or some portion of that. You're moving in and you're fixing to make

billions of dollars. You should be generating electricity that helps the rest of our communities because not everyone's going to get a job there. Let's just say you need to generate enough so that in times of need, you could put back onto the grid some electricity. I would say the same thing about water. If you're going to do this in Houston or Houston area, we're not in a drought. This is literally, so sorry to put it this way, my fellow Houstonians, we live in a swamp and it's not dry here. But if you're going to be in Corpus Christi, or you're going to be in West Texas or North Texas, even, especially if you're going to be in South Texas, where we need that water for our ag and livestock industries, for the citrus growers. Think about them. What I'm getting at is,

they need to have a plan to manage that resource. And here's where the railroad commission might come into play is, we're not talking about it yet, but we have an incredible problem with oilfield wastewater right now. We produce millions and millions of barrels an hour on this, and we're running out of poor space, sorry, we're running out of disposal space inside the ground, which is what we usually do with the waste product, dispose of it in the ground, because right now, even though we have the

technology to completely distill it, clean it to where it's pure, it's costly and time-consuming, and it's much less expensive to pump it down a hole in the ground. So, what if we're incentivizing, developing the technology to desalinate? So let's build some desal plants, reclaim some of this water.

What if data centers had to provide their own water? And by the way, as long as you're desalinating, let's make sure you've got capacity to bring some onto the grid, the water grid, if you will, instead of just barely making what you need. And then you're going after two birds with one stone, right? You're alleviating this waste problem. At the same time, you're cleaning this water,

and you don't have to clean it to the point where I can drink it or you can drink it. All you need to do is clean it to the point where you can use it for irrigation, clean it to the point where you can use it for cooling data centers. And actually, for those who are concerned about the water usage of data centers, just wait till you find out how much water, a gas-fired steam turbine that makes electricity uses, because this is multi-stage steam compression.

It will dwarf the usage of any data center in the state or in the country, even if they're using evaporative cooling towers, which is your open-loop style. because you need a butload of water to make electricity. So you have to make plans. And then the last piece, sorry, I'm off in the weeds, the last piece of this is we might be able to require a resource management plan, oh, and a setback standard from the state so that setback means just the distance from a residential area where you can be. Let's say it's a mile or two instead of 200 feet so that we don't impact our communities.

but also, let's have that resource management plan. The requirement needs to be that's approved locally. Because once again, if you're building this in my area where it's wet, it's going to look different than if you're building it out in the Permian Basin or in the Panhandle or southern plains, or if you're in the Rio Grande Valley or South Texas. It looks different in different places because the environment is different. Their resource infrastructure, their resource environment looks different.

Let's have an element of local control in that too. which personally I think is a conservative value. So that's a lot of words from someone who's actually not going to have a hand in regulating data centers. But I do think it's a sensible approach. Let's just manage this thing carefully and let them do the business. If that's what we're going to do, it brings revenue into the state. But let's make sure our communities benefit from it instead of us having, having to subsidize these people that are going to make billions while some folks are deciding

how much of their medication they can use or if they have to, you know, skimp on it. Yeah, just to follow up on one portion of that. Yeah. As you said, the water usage of data centers, that's a topic that really exceeds the authority of the Railroad Commission. It's really more so under agencies. But I heard a testifier at a recent committee hearing talk about the plan or the proposal that data centers bring in their own water.

And he said, what are they going to do? They're going to pipe it in from their home planet? And so maybe you could just elaborate a little bit on what that would actually look like in terms of infrastructure. Well, in the areas where we've got oilfield wastewater, this is where the Railroad Commission ties in because we are running out, literally running out of space underground to store this. So if they're going to desalinate, how about they desalinate oil field wastewater? So running pipelines is a whole other thing. And that might not be feasible in certain areas, but that would make it, for the same reason,

that would make it less feasible to build your data center there. And I'll just say, I don't know a huge amount about the technology inside of a data center. I'll just say, I don't know where you are sitting. I'm sitting in Houston, Texas, and I can do a significant amount of my work in Austin from this chair right here in Cyprus. So if I can work remotely, it seems like data centers can to put it in a place where either you have water or you can get water there.

Or, I don't know, Lake Boomer out in West Texas, if you're going to be building a data center out there anyway, how about you to start desalinating on that lake? Because it's, we haven't talked about it, but this is an oil field of waste water lake created by manmade means. That is 60 acres across. You can see it from outer space. and it's loaded with salt and hydrogen sulfide, so sulfur, salt, and even radioactive elements. It looks beautiful.

It's just noxious poison, and it's a lake you can see from outer space. We got a water source out there that we need to clean up anyway, so how about getting our data centers to help us with that? Well, real quick, thanks for all that on the Permian Basin Plan, on data centers. For the rest of our time, I'd like to touch really good. quickly on a few other topics that are also important, though haven't gotten as much sensation

in the media. And one is that recently the Texas Land Commissioner, Don Buckingham, initiated a process that would allow energy producers to develop on Texas public land. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Well, you know, Texas public lands, are we talking about the parks and wildlife? Are we talking about, you know, where they're building a wall through Big Bend, that the landowners disapproved, I understand you're not asking about building a border wall. You're asking about should we drill on public lands. You know, we haven't had to in 150 years

while we've been producing oil in this state. And we are already, we have the technology to be more efficient and effective at producing oil and gas as we ever have. I think the problem is not that we don't have the land or the resources to dig into. The problem is we've become so efficient that the rigs that are operating now are at capacity. And that capacity is so much more than it used to be.

We're producing record amounts of oil and gas right now with less rigs than we used to use before. So I think the deal is we need to build some more drilling rigs. And one of my favorite political lines is if you've never met a drill, baby drill Democrat before, now you know at least one. We should be building drilling rigs. We should be bringing this product out of the ground. We want the energy industry to be strong and continue to expand domestic production. Because like I said, to me personally, American independence is more important now than ever.

We're seeing that because of our rising costs for gasoline and diesel because of what's happening on the other side of the dam planet. And while we have the resources and the know-how to produce most of that here at home, So American energy independence and Texas dominance to me are the keys to those. I actually think we can do that without opening up our parks and wildlife preserves to drilling. The state actually owns a relatively small amount of that anyway. And the last piece is public lands belong to the public. If you are going to open it up to drilling, the public should get the money from that, not some private concern. Do you, are you at home right now thinking, oh yeah, I want to give up something I own personally

so someone else can profit off of it and I don't get a piece of that? B.S. Well, I wonder how the permanent school fund factors into all this. And I remember that public education was a big issue for you in your initial campaign in your first term in the house. And so maybe you could explain a little bit about how the permanent school fund works and maybe additionally how the railroad commission intersect. with that job.

Okay. Yeah. If you wanted a short answer, you didn't want to talk to me about public education. But let me just go at it like this. My daddy was a career educator, and so were both of his parents.

I grew up in a household where I've learned that teaching is one of the most noble professions on earth. It shapes the future of our society. And I actually believe in our constitutional, our state constitution calls out, the need for effective, efficient, free public schools. And there's good reason for that. We want an educated public and a workforce. Now, the permanent fund gets money from oil and gas severance taxes.

So once again, I depart from members of both sides of the legislature, both federal and state, where in my life, I believe you have to have a way to pay for a thing if you want to do that thing. It's the way it works in this house I'm sitting in, and it should be the way government works. So oil and gas, for example, my freshman session paid the severance taxes that allowed us to implement a full day pre-K universally across the state so that kids from poorer households could families could send their children to pre-K. From that aspect, a healthy oil and gas industry feeds the, uh, the public fund for education. It feeds our schools.

It actually is a major source of revenue for our state and all. If you want to have nice things, you have to have a way to pay for it. Oil and gas is a major component with that. So I know I used a lot of words. Did I answer your question or do you want to re-ask? You did. You did. It's helpful.

Okay, good. But the permanent school fund land, that is state-owned land, correct? Yeah, but the Oil and Gas Commission, the Railroad Commission of Texas, doesn't have purview over that public land, just while there is public land that the fund owns, the money for the fund, a piece of that comes from oil and gas severance taxes. So a portion of that goes into the economic stabilization fund, right,

which is what they call the rainy day fund. The spillover from that goes to other general revenue funded agency, like the permanent school fund and like the Department of Transportation Highway Construction Fund. And so all I'm saying is there's an indirect connection between oil and gas severance taxes and the funding of our schools and our roads for that matter. Well, I'd love to hear your plan to address inactive and orphaned wells. It's another big topic, squarely in the jurisdiction of the RRC. Now you're talking my language.

All right, y'all ready? This is the centerpiece of the Railroad Commission of Texas. So to start with a definition, there are hundreds of thousands of holes bored in the ground in our great state that were put there for producing oil and gas. Everyone sort of knows this kind of in background knowledge, right? When you hit the asset deep in the ground, you produce oil out of it or get natural gas or water even,

whatever it is that you're producing out of that well, Over time, the well plays out, formation pressure subsides, and even if we pump water down there, eventually it's not productive to the point where it's profitable, and the good operators will plug that thing, seal it well, move off and drill the next toll. Okay? What happens is thousands and thousands of wells don't get plugged and end up seeping, not just chemicals and stuff into the environment. Sometimes the operator just moves off and abandons it, or they'll even dissolve their corporation to evade a liability for it. And so those are the orphans, the orphan wells. Now, we started the year last year with a record number of orphan wells, 11,000 of these things

on the rolls, and more coming on all the time. So 11,000 on the rolls. The legislature last session appropriated an extra $100 million to the Railroad Commission, Texas, which is like somewhere between a 15 and 20 percent bump in the commission's budget, specifically to ramp up well plugging because they're proliferating and getting out of control, right? And to the commission's credit, you know, a thousand full-time employees and their contractors and all that stuff, they plugged like 2,000 wells. It's a record or near-record production and commend them for that. And so they went from 11,000 to 12,000, even though they plugged 2,000 wells.

So for those of you that are thinking, this dude is not very good at math, what the people don't tell you is there's 150 to 180,000 low producing or inactive wells out there. And some percentage of those become classified as orphan wells over time. And what's happening is that's happening more and more and faster and faster. So we have two problems. One is there's this huge bank of wells that are going to, some of which are going to become orphans, and we can't keep up with that. So even though we're plugging at record numbers, we can't keep up, half of the agency's budget,

half the Railroad Commission's budget went to plugging wells. And they did a great job, but they can't keep up. So what's my plan? Number one plan, increase the budget of the agency. And if I'm fortunate enough to be elected by the voters of Texas, I'll be the best damn lobbyist for this agency. I'll be a cheerleader for the Railroad Commission of Texas, and I have a couple of advantages.

Every audience I talk to, I say this is the center of my platform. The agency does not have the resources it need to do the work that it needs to do. And so I hope the other commissioners, remember there's three. People say, well, what are you going to do? You're one Democrat. You're going to have two Republicans. Will you get anything done? I'm like, the first thing to do is flying common ground.

and I hope they will be cheerleaders like me because we should double that agency budget just for starters because you want to ramp up $100 million, a 20% increase wasn't enough to even keep up. So you have to dramatically accelerate the well plugging program. You also need to cut off the source of these because there's more and more being drilled all the time. So back to the conversation where I want to incentivize the good operators

because they will take care of their stuff. We want to help operators that need help to succeed and operate within the rules. That means we help them plug the wells when they're moving off because it's way easier and less expensive when it's at the beginning, when it's first drilled. If you wait for decades,

without getting into a whole bunch of engineering gobbledygook, stuff gets messed up when it sits in a hole for decades, right? And you'll have to work it over just to do the plugging work. So you want to go after the source by helping operators be successful and operate within the rules. We have this massive proliferation that we have to go after and learn to plug at a much faster rate if we're even going to keep up. And I think the key to that is to better fund the Railroad Commission of Texas. And the bonus is if you're doing it more efficiently, efficiently in the long run, it actually costs you less. Because if I have to go on,

out and remediate a well that is 50 years old and is spewing crap into the air, into the ground, like when these wells erupts, sometimes it's a geyser, right, 50, 60 feet high. I've got a mess to clean up. I got a well to work over. I got all kinds of stuff I got to do to make that happen. When if we're just notified by an operator, hey, we're going to shut down and we need help getting this thing plugged, that's a quick and easy job. You can go out there and plug it for much less money, maybe between $2,000 and $5,000. If you're cleaning up a mess, they could be $50,000, $100,000. I've seen well cleanups.

It costs millions. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Let's get after these things before they become a problem. On to another topic that popped up in the RRCB last week, Exxon has got this carbon storage project coming up. If you're willing, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. This is just one permit that's recent, but I'd love to hear what you think about it. So this is one of the first ever permits granted for a P6 well, and that's, I'm sorry about rolling out technical jargon.

We classify the different kinds of wells. So like P2 is your general purpose, disposal well. P6 is the new classification for a carbon capture and storage well. And I bring these up because they're kind of similar operations. You're going to inject something in the ground and hold it there deep in the earth. The idea is you're doing, you're drilling and saying well below where the water table is, so your layers of earth deeper than that. You're hoping that it won't communicate or interact.

It depends on testing formations and making sure you don't exceed, you know, safe working pressures and stuff like that. And we could talk about that stuff all day. The point I'm making is the paperwork for a P2 well is like 10, 12 pages long. And the paperwork for this well that, Exxon just got a P6 well, 2,000 pages deep. So whatever you think about carbon capture technology and storage, some people think it's a hoax, some people think it's vital to, you know, improving our environment, whatever

your personal position on it as the regulator and the Railroad Commission of Texas, this is big-time money, y'all. It's big-time technology. Exxon is making large investments in that. That's how they end up being the first to get this. Not just Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Phil, BP. The major operators are investing in this technology. It's because there's demand for the products,

for low-carbon products, for them to even advertise that they're doing this, I think is a big deal to them. So no matter how you look at it, this is money operating in Texas. And it's clear that it might, actually be over-regulated. I don't know, but if you got to submit a file of over 2,000 pages to get an application, there's a lot of technical crap in there that probably is mostly needed.

Don't let me disparage the people that design the program. But I, if it's big money, if we don't invite these investments by the major operators, our neighboring states will, and we'll lose the revenue and we'll lose the industry, we'll lose the jobs. So let's just make sure we're doing this appropriately, carefully, safely, public safety and personal safety for the people, you know, the men and when that do these jobs is the highest priority to me because I have actually worked in industry and seen people get hurt. So I think the bottom line on this is we had two commissioners vote for it and one against.

I think the sensible view here is we manage it responsibly, we make the money, we promote the jobs, and move on. Well, just to pivot more toward the campaign side, are, yeah, what are the most important issues that, in your opinion, the Railroad Commission will have to address in the coming years? So, actually, we've already talked about a bunch of that, so you don't need a long-winded. And I apologize for how many words I use. I'm a, you know, I'm a dad. I tell horrible dad jokes. It's worse because I'm an engineer. I tell engineer dad jokes.

But the most important things are funding at the agency. So not just for ramping up, well, plugging operations. But if you want to start preventing these problems, avoiding the seismicity and stuff like that, we're going to have to hire more inspectors and technicians, right? if you want to attract and retain the best and the brightest, you can't pay them way below prevailing wages. So that's another reason this agency needs to be better funded because they've got a problem with workforce turnover.

And that actually costs you the taxpayer more money because I have to hire someone, even if I'm paying them a lower salary, I have to spend time, money, and energy training them up and getting them effective. And there's no replacement for having the best in the future. field. It allows you to operate more efficiently and more effectively. So one of the main things that we need extra budget at this agency for is to grow the workforce and be able to attract and retain

qualified best and brightest workers. So you all can apply for jobs and feel like you're making a competitive wage, you know? So yeah, that, the well-plugging program. Oh, and the last thing is accountability to the public. We just had an issue just recently where the Railroad Commission of Texas changed their public participation and comment policy. So this is where, you know, the commission is 1,000 employees, but it's headed by three commissioners who serve six-year terms. One is up every two years.

That's the job I'm running for right now, right? They're the ones who direct policy. They have an open meeting every month. you the public should have a right to see how your government operates, how they spend your money, how they do what, how they serve your communities. And so we have an open meetings requirement, open meetings and records act in Texas. The railroad commission just moved to remove the standing agenda item for public comment. So you are no longer guaranteed your three minutes to speak at this meeting.

You still can get it if a commissioner invites it or accepts it, but it's not guaranteed. Y'all, we work for you. When I say we elected officials should be public servants, and you have every right to know how we do your business for you. So that vote went two to one. I would be a replacement for one of the yes votes, and so day one, I think the very first thing we should do is reverse that to work. reinstall the public participation and comment portion of every open meeting.

In addition to that, I think it would be important for me personally to travel the state. Y'all, I'm a city boy. I live in Houston, Texas. I grew up in university towns. Remember, my daddy was a university professor. It's super important for me to come out and hear your perspective in every area of the state. So I'll be traveling to the Permian Basin, the Panhandle, South Texas, West Texas, everywhere I can to have listening sessions

because if your government represents you and is supposed to serve you, it should also listen to you. Well, for our listeners and viewers, by the way, the Texan has reached out to the Republican nominee for this race, Beau French, to see if he'd be willing to participate in a similar interview on the Permian Basin Plan

and on the campaign more broadly. But just to continue with campaign-related topics, French's prevailing critique of you is radicalism. And that's his general accusation. And so just to, you know, inject some more quantitative information into this debate, Mark P. Jones, who is a fellow at Bryce University, who charts the political leanings of the Texas legislature every year.

For 2025, he ranked you the 15th most liberal member of the House, really of the Democratic Caucus, which had 62 members in 2025. And so I just want to give you a chance to respond to French. and ask you how you would speak to voters who are considering voting for French in November? So first I'll say the nickname my colleagues have for me is rowdy Rosenthal, not radical. And it's because I stand up to bullies like this guy. And I'm not large in stature. I'm like 5'7, but here's the question about my legislative history.

I will absolutely own that I am a Democrat from Houston. in Texas, I'm cool with gay and queer people. It's fine. It has nothing to do with the operation of the Railroad Commission of Texas. And while Mark Jones has me, you know, outside of the most liberal third, the reason for that is because I'm more oil and gas friendly than most of my Democratic colleagues. Over four sessions, over four terms in the Texas House of Representatives, I would benchmark the voting history of the current chairman of the Energy Resources Committee. Nobody thinks this guy is against oil and gas. He's from an oil and gas area.

Chairman Drew Darby and I agreed on energy policy 89% of the time over four sessions. And this last session, 94% of the time, some of those votes where we were different is because one of us was absent, right? So I actually catch flack from some of the more liberal folks in the Democrat side. Because I'm so friendly to oil and gas workers, y'all, I'm in Cyprus, Texas.

I am just outside of the energy corridor. I'm a mile and a half from the facility where I used to work at building equipment for deep water technology and services. So I represent now in Houston a large swath of oil and gas workers, folks who work in the industry, who provide equipment and services that bring energy to the world. And so I put my record up against anyone. been willing to cross my own party lines, at least as often as I have crossed Drew Darby's votes. And so when it comes to this topic, I think I'm just about as good as you can get in the house. I'm an independent voice and nobody owns me. I just do what I think is right. And by and

large, that supports the oil and gas industry and helping them be successful and operate within the current laws. And let's just remember, Republicans have been. been in the levers of power, have been in charge of the levers of power for over 30 years. The laws that we have now were written by Republican legislatures. And I happen to believe they're mostly sensible, reasonable regulations. My opponent seems to forward the notion that we're over-regulating the oil and gas industry in Texas. I think the best position I can offer is we should just be in a position to enact, enforce the regulations we already have in place, because I think they're sensible.

So I hope that answers the question about my political leanings. I will absolutely own being a liberal legislator, and we can talk about that in the context of legislation. This job carries out the rules and the regulations of the state of Texas and requires some technical knowledge, and I got 25 years of experience in the industry. I know how this stuff works. Well, all right.

Thank you so much, John, for agreeing to participate. you've been a great sport with a good understanding of the RRC and how its authority overlaps with other agencies in the state and with the Texas House and with this issue more broadly. So thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Can I take two seconds and plug my website, John RosenthaltX.com? If you want to see more about my policy positions, I've actually put quite a bit of thought

into the words that are on the website. So go check it out.