Amid Texas freeze, oil producers still shut; governor bans natural gas exports
HOUSTON, (Reuters) - Texas oil producers and refiners remained shut for a fifth day yesterday after several days of blistering cold, and the governor ordered a ban on natural gas exports from the state to try to speed the restoration of power.
The cold snap, which has killed at least 21 people and knocked out power to more than 4 million people in Texas, is not expected to let up until this weekend.
Governor Greg Abbott directed Texas natural gas providers not to ship outside the state until Sunday and asked the state energy regulator to enforce his export ban.
“That will also increase the power that’s going to be produced and sent to homes here in Texas,” Abbott said at a news conference Wednesday.
The ban prompted a response from officials in Mexico, which relies on imports via pipeline from Texas. More than 40% of U.S. natural gas exports come from Texas.
Texas produces more natural gas and oil than any other U.S. state, and its operators, unlike those in North Dakota or Alaska, are not used to dealing with frigid temperatures.
The state accounts for roughly one-quarter of U.S. natural gas production, about 27.8 billion cubic feet per day, but it consumes only part of that, shipping the rest to other states or via pipeline to Mexico, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Texas’ energy sector has been hit hard by the cold, with about 4 million barrels per day (bpd) of daily refining capacity shuttered and at least 1 million bpd of oil production out as well.
Natural gas output also slumped. At this time a week ago, Texas was producing about 7.9 billion cubic feet per day, but that fell to 1.9 billion on Wednesday, according to preliminary data from Refinitiv Eikon. Natural gas accounts for half of Texas’ power generation.
Christi Craddick, chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, said late Wednesday the agency had received the governor’s request and was reviewing it.
The request set up a game of political football, according to a person familiar with the matter, between groups that do not have the authority to interfere with interstate commerce.
WASHINGTON, - President Joe Biden supports a study on whether descendants of enslaved people in the United States should receive reparations, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said yesterday, as the issue was being debated on Capitol Hill. Psaki told reporters that Biden “continues to demonstrate his commitment to take comprehensive action to address the systemic racism that persists today.”
Reparations have been used in other circumstances to offset large moral and economic debts - paid to Japanese Americans interned during World War Two, to families of Holocaust survivors and to Blacks in post-apartheid South Africa.
But the United States has never made much headway in discussions of whether or how to compensate African Americans for more than 200 years of slavery and help make up for racial inequality.
HR-40, a bill to fund the study of “slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies” has been floated in Congress for more than 30 years, but never taken up for a full vote.
Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee reintroduced it in January.
Fellow Democratic Representative Steve Cohen, who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, told a hearing on Wednesday it was fitting to consider HR-40 at a time when the country is reckoning with police violence against Blacks and a pandemic that has disproportionately affected African Americans.
Biden told the Washington Post last year that “we must acknowledge that there can be no realization of the American dream without grappling with the original sin of slavery, and the centuries-long campaign of violence, fear, and trauma wrought upon Black people in this country.”
But like nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates at the time, he did not embrace the idea of specific payments to enslaved people’s descendants, instead promising “major actions to address systemic racism” and further study.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last June following the death in police custody in Minneapolis of George Floyd, an African-American man, found clear divisions along partisan and racial lines, with only one in 10 white respondents supporting the idea and half of Black respondents endorsing it.
Calls have been growing from some politicians, academics and economists for such payments to be made to an estimated 40 million African Americans. Any federal reparations program could cost trillions of dollars, they estimate.
Supporters say such payments would act as acknowledgement of the value of the forced, unpaid labor that supported the economy of Southern U.S. states until the Civil War ended slavery in 1865, the broken promise of land grants after the war and the burden of the century and a half of legal and de facto segregation that followed.