Texas Sen.-elect Kevin Sparks won’t take office till next January in Austin, but he hopes to be appointed to the senate’s Natural Resources and Economic Development Committee and address his concerns about bolstering the state’s electrical power grid and its oil and natural gas industry.
Elected without a runoff over three March 1 Republican Primary opponents and having no opposition in the Nov. 8 general election, the Midlander says there are not enough natural gas-powered electrical generation plants in the state and a recent announcement by the Public Utilities Commission was worrisome that Texans should set their air conditioners on 78 degrees to avoid blackouts.
“I expect at a bare minimum that I will get asked to serve on the energy committee because nobody in the senate has the scope and breadth of experience that I have in the energy industry,” said Sparks, president of the Discovery Operating independent oil and gas company and an employee of the family business since graduating with a business degree from the University of Texas in 1986.
“The Texas power grid is very much at risk and we should be concerned that we have sufficient energy to power it,” he said. “We haven’t made the fundamental structural changes that we need to make in order to make it secure.”
Referring to the Winter Storm Uri-spawned outages of February last year, Sparks said, “One thing that was in the legislation last year after the big freeze was that those power generators had to have access to backup generation so they could come up with the electricity when they were called on.
“That provision got stripped out of the bill and the governor put it on the PUC, but I don’t believe the PUC has made that happen up to this point. We get 30 percent of our electricity from wind and solar and if we have a real hot day or a real cold day, we might not have sufficient power generation.”
Ready to succeed retiring 31st District Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo, Sparks said May 11 that the situation is getting more urgent because 1,500 people are moving to Texas each day “and we are not adding reliable power to our grid.”
He said the Permian Basin has the advantage of being a relatively low cost oil- and gas-producing region, but it and other energy-producing areas are being bedeviled by the Biden administration’s open hostility to the industry in deference to the president’s political indebtedness to the Green New Deal environmentalists.
“The current administration is really doing everything they can to thwart hydrocarbon production and they can do an awful lot from D.C.,” Sparks said. “Obama had a lot of stuff teed up to implement, but Trump got elected and put a lot of that back in. Then Biden came along and reversed it. Now they’re making everything as cumbersome and expensive as they can because their motive is to put us out of business.”
Along with high prices for oil and gas, he said, the cost of pipe has doubled in the past year and the costs of fracture treating and running rigs have greatly increased. “In addition to that,” Sparks said. “a lot of the larger companies are capitally constrained.
“The oil and gas business globally is lifting people out of poverty and we don’t have the technology today to replace hydrocarbons and maintain our standard of living.”
He said another priority when he takes office will be to help upgrade foster care. “We need to continue working on community-based foster care,” Sparks said.
“Our foster care system in Texas right now is broken.”
