We completed what people didn't think could get done, which was a billion-dollar pipeline moving gas out of Pennsylvania into New Jersey. The project got built. It was a great feat by the permitting teams to work with the states, worked with local land owners, worked with school boards that were going to benefit from the ad valorem tax, worked with the unions to have them bringing their voice to the table. So really great grassroots effort to get that project permitted. It got permitted. It was up and running. It was running at near full load during the middle of the winter and a federal court came out and vacated the certificate and said you can no longer operate because the certificate was not issued correctly by FERC because FERC did not look at the greenhouse gas rule. Well, there is not a law about greenhouse gas.
Americans are capable of achieving extraordinary things when they have the freedom and opportunity to do so. This is American Potential. Hey everyone, welcome to the American Potential podcast. I'm your host, David. Summer's upon us, which means summer travel time. Engineer Matt, besides the travel that the podcast has planned, do you have any plans to drive anywhere this summer?
Oh, I don't have any specific plans just yet, but I have a friend who lives in Arizona, and I usually make it a point to get out to Arizona a couple times a year, so I'm thinking about road tripping it. But I'll say the podcast keeps me traveling enough that sometimes I'm like, you know what? I think I'm just going to stay home for a little bit.
Well, I also know you're a driver. I mean, you're in southern Colorado, and I know we went to Montana, you drove up there. I guess I can't blame a guy for wanting to drive in that part of the country because it's pretty gorgeous. And so I like a good drive myself. I don't mind driving a number of hours because it just seems to be a nice time to center yourself and kind of see this beautiful country.
It is such a great thing. I love a good road trip and getting out seeing how much of the country there is to see. That's one of the things we stay within a few miles of our homes, our work, our offices. But getting out and seeing the country and seeing it by road is one of my favorite things. I hope as time goes on I'll get to rent an RV or something and drive out west, but I've been blessed to be able to get to a lot of beautiful areas in this country and there are so many. So now I want to share them with my kids and make sure we see that and make that part of our summer plans.
Got to love it. The family road trip. You can't beat it. You know, energy plays a big role in our summer plans. Are you hoping to get on a plane to get where you want to go or loading up the car for a road trip? And when it comes to keeping your house cool during the hot summer months, where are you setting your thermostat at? So, what if Washington could make energy production less expensive simply by getting some of the roadblocks out of the way? We'll talk about that with today's guest, who spent about 40 years working in the energy industry. He's the newest US Senator replacing Markwayne Mullin after he was named the new Secretary of Homeland Security. I want to welcome to the podcast Oklahoma US Senator Alan Armstrong. Senator, welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you, David. Glad to be here.
Great. Well, you just started. How's it been? Did you figure out where everything is? How are you enjoying your time?
Good. You know, it's been a lot of learning, but I love learning and it's a new challenge. I had been in the CEO role for about, in chairman role for about 15 years. And so this was a big change, but one that I've really found fascinating and challenging and I get to learn something new every day. So it's been good. Been about nine, almost 10 weeks now. So it feels like it's been a long time at this point.
I don't know. Yeah, I imagine it seems like a long time, but then time flies too. 10 weeks. Wow. Sure. I know as an organization, Americans for Prosperity, we're pretty thrilled to have someone with your expertise and experience in the Senate. I mean, energy production is such an important issue, especially right now, and your experience is so crucial. So, I'm excited for this conversation and for the work that you're going to be able to do while you're there in the Senate. But I kind of wanted to go back to just the start of your career. I mean, you're trained as an engineer. Why did you want to be an engineer and what got you started in the energy industry in the first place?
Yeah. Well, I think it was a bit natural to me. I always really liked solving problems. I actually had two uncles that were engineers and I got to see a lot of the interesting work that they got to do. My granddad was a chemist for Phillips Petroleum at the time. So I was kind of around the energy industry growing up to a certain degree. Anyway, but it was fascinating to me to see really large-scale construction and see what humans, when they worked together, what they were capable of accomplishing on a large scale. And so that was really interesting to me from day one. I think learning engineering really is a matter of teaching people to break down problems, taking very large problems, breaking them into smaller ones that can be achieved with groups of people. So that was really interesting to me and continues to fascinate me, and I love a good challenge. Frankly, that's why this job's been so exciting to me is I do see it as a brand new challenge.
Well, I as an observer of the US Senate and of Congress in general, I'd say that we need more people who have that mindset holding seats in Congress. So, you rose over the 40 years, were chairman and CEO of the Williams Company. First of all, tell us what the Williams Companies does, and what would you say made you successful and allowed you to move to the highest levels of the company?
Yeah, thanks. Well, the Williams Companies is a large-scale energy infrastructure operator and handles about a third of the nation's natural gas through its pipeline systems and plants. So what it does is basically picks up gas supplies in producing areas and moves it through long-haul transmission lines that go all the way across the United States and delivers it into the key market centers. And so it delivers it to your utility. So if you're a customer of Duke or Con Edison if you're in New York, Williams probably carried that natural gas from a producing area to those utilities, and then the utilities distribute that to the home. So that's basically what Williams does in a nutshell. Today it's gotten into providing more and more for the power for the AI movement and a lot of the gas-fired generation for that. So it's really taken off with a lot of wind in its sails with the AI move right now.
Well, so as you moved up in the company, I'm sure you've seen the effect that regulation has in a heavily regulated industry. What was your impression of regulations and the effect on the industry?
Yeah, you know, I would say it moved from when I was a project manager for the company, I was in the business of having to overcome those obstacles and figure a creative way to move through the regulatory process to get things done. But one of the things I noted about that was your job as a project manager was to just take on that barrier, figure out the quickest way to get around it and to deal with it and solve the problem and move on. It wasn't to say, 'Okay, well, how do we make sure next time the regulation is a little more fitting?' Said another way, your job was just to play whack-a-mole. It wasn't to try to fix the process. And that's part of the problem, frankly, with the way our regulatory process works today. You've got project managers there whose job is to get that project built as soon as they can. They don't have time to wrestle with the regulator to say, 'You know, really this makes no sense at all.' But because you're usually just saying, 'Okay, fine. We'll do it anyway,' and moving on so that you can expedite the project. The regulator themselves doesn't feel like they're doing their job if they don't come up with some new requirement every time a new project's built. How boring would it be to say, 'Hey, we have a really good set of standards that we've been using. As long as you comply with these standards, we'll give you the permit and you can move on.' That's just not what regulators want to do. And if the project manager is not going to push back on that and is just going to say, 'Uh yeah, thank you sir. Can I have another?' Then that's kind of the way the permitting process is built up. And then on top of that, you have the NGOs and the environmental opposition that frankly makes money by fighting and trying to stir trouble up on a project. And that's how they raise their money, frankly, is by villainizing the corporation. So there's not really very many people in that process on the ground floor that are actually saying, 'Hey, how do we actually make this better for our country? How do we actually streamline this process so that we can get the work done?' Because the project manager that actually knows how to do that doesn't have time to deal with that. They're just trying to clear the next hurdle and get on to it, and they're not trying to improve our processes. Not because they're bad people, they just literally don't have time to deal with it. And there's a lot of times where today there's so many regulators, both state and federal, that are duplicative. There's a lot of times where there's mutually exclusive requirements. So a state regulator will say, 'You have to install your soil erosion control on this project this way if you want the permit from me.' And the feds will say, 'No, no, no, no. You have to do it my way.' Sometimes those ways are actually mutually exclusive. And so if you're the project manager, you're sitting there saying, 'Would somebody just pick? I don't really care which way we do it. I just need to have certainty.' But the regulators will just kind of cross their arms and say, 'It's not my problem. You either do it my way or you're not getting the permit.' And both of those are required to move the project ahead. So those are the kind of things that have really made the world of getting big large-scale infrastructure built these days really difficult.
