Powering the Permian – how national policies could affect local industries in upcoming presidential election

 

The race to the White House has under 3 months left to go.

How could who’s elected president, and their beliefs affect the local economy in the Permian Basin? Specifically, oil and gas jobs.

ABC Big 2’s Chris Talley spoke with the owner of a local petroleum company about how he and many others might be affected by the upcoming presidential election.

“This affects everybody in our population here, especially in Southeastern New Mexico and West Texas,” said Kirk Edwards, President and CEO of Latigo Petroleum in Odessa.

Since the 1980s, Edwards has operated the company and says he’s no stranger to how politics nationally have affected how he conducts business.

“Somehow in the past few decades it became a ‘political football’ and we’ve seen it go both ways – there’s no doubt about it,” Edwards said.

In recent years,  the Biden Administration has pushed the transition to green energy across the country and imposed regulations on oil and gas like higher costs to drill on public land.

The Trump Administration before reduced regulatory burdens as it tried to push more U.S. energy production and exports.

Looking to this election as Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris tries to sway voters in Pennsylvania, the second largest producer of nature gas production behind Texas, she recently has changed her stance on oil fracking. This goes against her beliefs four years ago to have it banned as she campaigned for president in 2020...more

The popular Mexican convenience store brand OXXO is set to take over DK locations across Texas and New Mexico.

 

...FEMSA, the company behind OXXO, has signed a massive $385 million deal with Delek U.S. Holdings to acquire 249 convenience stores in Texas and New Mexico.

OXXO, known for its convenient locations and wide variety of products, is a household name in Mexico and other countries like Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. 

The deal awaits regulatory approval expected in the second half of 2024 so soon enough we will begin to see local DK stores changing their colors for a bright red and yellow!...more

EPA issues emergency order to halt use of dangerous pesticide

 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced an emergency order Tuesday to remove from the market a pesticide linked to fetal damage, its first such action in nearly four decades.

In a statement, the EPA said exposure to the pesticide, dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known DCPA or dacthal, can affect fetal thyroid hormone levels. These changes are in turn associated with lower birth weights and impairments to brain development and motor skills.

The EPA’s risk assessment, which the agency released in May 2023, estimates that handling DCPA products while pregnant could expose fetuses to between four and 20 times the chemical level considered safe. Environments where the pesticide has already been applied may be similarly risky, particularly for agricultural workers doing work such as weeding or harvesting in areas where it has been applied.

DCPA is primarily used for weed control for crops, including cabbage, onions and broccoli. The EPA made the decision at a time when DCPA is up for its registration review, a process all pesticides must undergo every 15 years under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act...more

The Government Is Choking Off Wineries

 

The drinks world has been rocked by dramatic media stories about barren patches of California countryside, abandoned vineyards, and scores of wineries closing their doors. Photos show tens of thousands of vineyard acres being bulldozed and then pulverized into wood chips by large industrialized grinders across the Golden State. 

This "Grape Apocalypse" (Grape-pocalypse?) is being framed as the sad but inevitable result of declining consumer interest in wine. That's true, but it's not the full picture. 

Unsurprisingly, the wine industry has been hit by inflation. However, the market has also been flooded by spikes in imported wines and grocery store chains preferring their own private-label wine brands (such as Costco's Kirkland Signature wines or Whole Foods' Wine Farmer).

The long-term future of the wine sector is bleak given that Millenials and Gen-Zers are not only drinking less alcohol in general than previous generations but are also increasingly opting for microbrews and craft cocktails over vino. Global wine consumption has hit a 27-year low and American wine sales fell by 8.7 percent in 2023...more

Gov't sets out to prevent something in the market place, and instead creates something worse 

Due to the three-tier system that nearly every state subjects alcohol to, wholesalers or distributors act as government-mandated middlemen connecting alcohol producers to retail stores. The purported rationale for the three-tier system is to prevent Big Alcohol monopolies from forming at the producer level of the supply chain.

And yet, it has essentially done the opposite. For decades there were multiple distributors available for almost every winery. Today, there are fewer than 1,000 distributors for over 8,000 American wineries—and out of those distributors, it's actually just three goliath distributors that control up to 67 percent of all the U.S. wine sales (in some states this climbs to over 90 percent).

This begets a form of government-sponsored collusion, in which the largest distributors disproportionately focus most of their energy on servicing the accounts from the largest wineries. Many smaller and medium-sized wineries are often unable to find distributors who will carry their products. In turn, their wines never even make it to store shelves, severing them from their main market-access channel entirely. When less wine is being produced or sold, fewer grapes are needed—hence the growing epidemic of vineyard desecrations.

It's a lesson the government never learns, especially when it comes to booze: If you create a government-mandated middleman in the name of stopping private alcohol monopolies at one level of the supply chain (the producer level), you inevitably end up creating a government-sanctioned monopoly in another level. Eventually, as Wine-Searcher put it, the "arteries" of America's wine market—the world's largest—become "clogged," with the repercussions flowing all the way back up the supply chain to the grapes themselves.  

The way to help independent wineries is to reform the laws to allow more wineries to self-distribute their products directly to retailers, including across state lines. Better yet, scrap the three-tier system entirely and allow alcohol to operate like basically every other industry in America. 

US border migrant crossings fall for fifth month in a row

 

The number of unlawful crossings by migrants at the US southern border has dropped for the fifth consecutive month, according to official data.

US Border Patrol agents apprehended around 57,000 migrants along the border in July - the lowest recorded since September 2020.

The numbers are down significantly from December, when around 250,000 migrants were caught crossing the border

Border Patrol recorded 141,000 apprehensions in February, 137,000 in March, 129,000 in April, 118,000 in May and 84,000 in June.

The figures do not include official border crossings, where the Biden administration has been processing around 1,500 migrants each day through a smartphone app that schedules appointments between migrants and US border agents...more

And they will continue to drop until election day, and then...it depends on who wins the election, don't it.