Regulator’s energy ties in spotlight

Texan who defended industry also profits from natural gas

Late last month, as Texans were digging out from a historic winter storm and dayslong power outages, the state’s chief oil and gas regulator had a clear message: Natural gas producers are not responsible for the disaster.

“Some media outlets would have you believe that natural gas producers and frozen transmission lines caused the power shortages across the state,” said Christi Craddick, who chairs a three-member commission overseeing the industry, during a Texas House hearing Feb. 26. “But … these operators were not the problem. The oil and gas industry was the solution.”

Craddick and her father, a well-known Republican state representative who sits on two House committees overseeing oil and gas, have direct financial ties to that industry, including with some of the same gasproducing companies that have admitted to shutdowns of their facilities during the storm.

The father-daughter pair, who are from Midland — the heart of the West Texas oil and gas boom of the past decade — own and manage land across the state that generated more than $100,000 from Texas’s largest natural gas producers in 2019, according to forms they submitted to the state Ethics Commission last year.

Critics say the ownership stakes reflect a conflict of interest for the Craddicks and exemplify a major ethics loophole in Texas, where regulators are allowed to have financial interests in the companies they oversee, unlike in some other oil-rich states. The ties are also newly relevant in light of last month’s blackouts, which left more than 9 million Texans without power and may turn out to be the costliest weather event in the state’s history.

Adrian Shelley, director of the advocacy group Public Citizen’s Texas office, said regulatory agencies in the state are “explicitly in service of industry.” He added that in the absence of robust conflictof-interest laws preventing such situations, many Texans assume energy regulators are controlled by oil interests.

Christi Craddick declined an interview request. In a statement, she said she is transparent about her investments and that the agency she leads — archaically named the Railroad Commission — “has no jurisdiction regarding mineral interests, royalty payments, or stock investments.”