Well, welcome to this podcast for the Western Caucus in the US Senate. I'm Cynthia Lummis. I chair the Senate Western Caucus and I've really been looking forward to today's podcast because we are with Alan Armstrong, the new US Senator in the US Senate who is from the state of Oklahoma. And he comes to us in a very unusual way. So, welcome Senator Armstrong. It's wonderful to have you on our podcast. Can you tell us how you got here?
Yeah. Well, thank you. I was really excited to get to talk to Cynthia. You've been such a kind and considerate face since I showed up at Senate. Coming out of business, never having any political ambitions, never having any interest in being in the Senate. And then, you know, the governor of Oklahoma asked me to, and he has the right in Oklahoma on an interim basis to make an appointment. And so, Mark Wayne Mullins, who was in this seat, which was previously Senator Inhofe's seat. So he came into the seat and then he got called up to be the DHS secretary and then it was one of those things where it was kind of merry-go-round. Next thing I knew, I got a call from the governor saying, 'Hey, could you be in my office Monday morning?' And he said, 'Well, would you consider doing the Senate role?' And I was like, 'What?' I said, 'I'm sure I can find somebody a lot better qualified. I'll help you. I know I can help you find somebody who'd be really qualified to do this, but I'm honored you'd even ask, obviously.' But so that was a conversation like two or three weeks. I didn't hear much back. I gave him some names that I thought would be good. And when I told him that, he said, 'That's not what I asked you. I asked you if you'd be willing to do it if I asked you to.' Anyway, he then called me up on a Saturday. I think that was like maybe the 19th or 20th of March and said, 'Hey, can you be in Florida to meet with President Trump tomorrow at 1:00?' And so I said, 'Well, yeah, for what?' And so he, well, I want to introduce you to him about taking this role. So that was a Sunday and then it got announced on a Monday night and I got sworn in here then on Tuesday.
Yeah. Isn't it a whirlwind? I am so glad your governor was persistent with you and I'm so glad that you said yes because you bring such a unique background to the Senate and it's one that we need right now because your area of interest and expertise is permitting reform and that's something that now we're even seeing on a bipartisan basis is something that's sorely needed. So, tell us how because of your longstanding role with the Williams company, which is a huge highly respected Oklahoma based company that Wyoming people are very, very familiar with. But so are others in the West and all over the country. You were both president and CEO and then sort of head of the board of directors. Am I right?
Okay, tell us how based on that experience you came to view permitting as something you want to address.
Yeah, you know, I actually started off as a field engineer for Williams back in 1986 and back then we could get stuff built. You know, it wasn't all that complicated. There were requirements, environmental requirements, but it really, you know, you could go and get stuff built. In fact, I spent a lot of my time in Wyoming, building out there in upstream of Reiner, Wyoming by Rollins, and building out some of the gathering and processing systems there in that area. And, you know, it just wasn't that hard to get stuff built. Over time, as I watched it, it just got crazier and crazier and harder and harder to build to the point where we want to fuss about high prices. We want to fuss about high gasoline prices in California. People want to fuss about high utility prices in New England. And yet, we have some of the lowest cost resources sitting there available, but we won't build the infrastructure. California, you know, kind of shut out everything, all fossil fuel. New England, particularly the governor of New York, shut down pipelines going across the state of New York to bring the lowest cost gas, not just in the nation, but in some areas the lowest cost gas in the world in Marcellus and Utica. And you're trying to get it into the New England states.
Which is some of the highest in the wintertime, some of the highest price. It's only 120 miles in Wyoming speak. That's nothing.
Nothing. Yeah. And so 120 miles away, we've got some of the lowest cost gas, some of the highest price gas. People are livid about their utility bills. And it's all because we've got a permitting process that allows people to stop critical infrastructure like that. So, the home heating oil that they use in New England and is extremely high priced is something that you through the Williams company wanted to get to that market and save them all that money with clean burning natural gas, which is the cleanest burning hydrocarbon by far.
And lower their costs and they said no. Right. And particularly the governor of New York said can't cross my state with your pipeline even though this was going through very rural areas that actually wanted the pipeline to come through the rural areas because they wanted access; in most those areas they're either burning fuel oil or propane and they wanted access, particularly the industries and the businesses wanted access to the low-cost natural gas. But in New York what you figure out pretty quickly is it doesn't really make any difference if you're upstate New York. The only voters that really dictate anything are downstate and Manhattan.
And so the poor folks in New York, not only do they not have access to that low-cost natural gas, there's tremendous gas reserves in the Marcellus that sit in New York and they've banned fracking in New York.
They have. And so they've stopped themselves from being able to take — I love taking people up there and showing them when you drive around in that area. In Pennsylvania, you drive by and you see these beautiful farms and ranches with brand new fences, big brand new four-wheel John Deeres everywhere you look. Beautiful. I mean, just really, you know, Wow, these people are like this looks like Kentucky ranches around here. Exactly. And then you go right across the border and it is desolate and impoverished. It is because the people in Pennsylvania have had the benefit of getting the royalties off all of that gas in that area, and the governors and the politics in New York have been anti-fossil fuel and they've stopped — not just they're stopping access for other people to access the gas, but the landowners in that area are stopped from being able to get the royalties off the gas in that market.
Yeah. So, you saw this firsthand. You were boots on the ground trying to help people in America. Yeah.
And couldn't get her done, right? And so it's just, you know, it's crazy some of the stuff. But I remember, I always kind of when I think about Wyoming, I think about when I first started working there and the last project that I was involved with there, which was the Overland Pass pipeline, which was a natural gas liquids pipeline that comes out of Kemmerer, actually starts all the way down in the Piceance and then comes up to Kemmerer and then across along I-80 and then south into Kansas. And that pipeline was held up for a year over studying to make sure we knew exactly where the three-toed jumping mouse
Oh, I know it well. I mean, I've never seen one because it's a subspecies. I don't — we never found one. We never found one, but we looked and looked and looked and looked for one.
And so I'm — listen, I love the outdoors. I love wildlife. I love the fact that we work hard to protect our environment, but we can't exist as a nation and be competitive with other nations when we don't have balance to those decisions and we don't find ways to allow ourselves to mitigate that. Like, it wasn't like we were going to — nobody said, 'Hey, we found them.' It was just, 'Well, we need to study it further to make sure they're not here.'
So, is where's the biggest bottleneck? Is it litigation? Is it time delays at the federal agency level? What's your —
Everybody always thinks that it's the big bad federal agencies. And I will say that they are bureaucratic. I'm not going to say that they're speedy, but they're generally well-intended, effective agencies. The problem is that the litigation has forced all of these agencies to go, 'Oh my god, we're going to get sued. We better make sure we know exactly what's here.'
So, it's all the litigation that's on their heads.
