By WEN Staff

By the end of last month, Don Likwartz, had spent 11 years at the helm of the Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, as supervisor of the state agency that oversees the state oil and gas industry.

Likwartz retired on January 2nd still looking spray but admittedly waging a second round with cancer. “I need to get on top of this,” he said in an early December interview, and he’s not likely to remain in his native and beloved Wyoming. “Winters are getting too hard,” he said, ruefully.

Recognizing his contribution to the energy industry in Wyoming, Wyoming Energy News is reprising the full interview Likwartz gave to the Gillette News-Record last month. As the man in charge of overseeing and regulating an energy industry that went through massive growth and change under his watch, he provides a unique perspective in his Q&A with the newspaper’s Wendilyn Grasseschi.

Q. What are the most important things that Wyoming can do to remain competitive and to maintain a viable state economy over the next four to eight years?

A. Diversify. We are going to have to diversify. We produce more energy than any other state in the country, we produce 11 percent of the entire United States’ energy demand. The nation needs us as much as we need it. But it is difficult because we are a small state with long distances between populations that are far from markets. It would be nice to have more power plants so that we could ship power out rather than sending more trains of coal out, more transmission lines to export our energy.

We are going to have to get into carbon sequestration in a big way. There’s no avoiding it. We are going to need to use CO2 technology to recover more of our oil. We already know where the oil is, but the problem now is we could use two to three times more CO2 to extract that oil than we have available in the state.

We have to keep increasing our emphasis on new technological innovations, like the agreement with General Electric and the University of Wyoming (for a new coal gasification research facility). We have to become the state on the cutting edge of all the new energy technologies.

Q. What is the biggest challenge that will face Wyoming under a new Obama administration?

A. Hopefully the new administration will make more progress in educating the average American about the oil and gas industry, rather than allowing people to think that we can ever be completely energy independent. It’s not going to happen.

At some point, we are going to have to realize we are part of a worldwide economy based on oil and gas and we are also going to have to recognize that we cannot move away from oil and gas completely because renewables will not provide enough energy to feed a growing demand for energy, even if we do conserve and do use new technologies.

We do need to conserve as much as possible, but we are going to have to give up some things in our standard of living if we are going to meet the increasing demand for energy in the future and not use oil
and gas. I don’t believe Americans want to do that.

Q. What is the biggest decision the industry made during your time with the commission that has come back to haunt it?

A. Well, I don’t think we really made any mistakes, but with regard to coal-bed methane, in hindsight, I
wish we could have realized how fast it was going to occur. Things were happening so fast that nobody, no agencies, had the staff to manage the flush. It was hard for the agencies to keep up with the demand for permits, to get the permits out the door and it was hard to get enough people out there to do the inspections to make sure it was done right. We did all staff up, but I wish there had been a way to see it
coming, but of course, there wasn’t.

Q. Do you believe the oil and gas industry has had a negative impact on sage grouse numbers?

A. The problem with the sage grouse is that we had no baseline numbers for the bird in the parts of the state with oil and gas development before the development. In fact, most of the data we do have now has been paid for by the companies themselves, to try to assess what is out there.

Secondly, we have been in a drought for all but a few of the years I have been with the commission and we don’t know the impacts of that to the grouse.

Third, we don’t know the impact of the loss of habitat caused by new subdivisions and other disturbances to the land. There is no reliable data and what we do have is conflicting. People I talk to tell me grouse numbers are up in Wyoming these past few years. But that said, companies are becoming much more proactive with regard to the grouse. They are doing far more mitigation, more reclamation and they are doing it sooner than in the past.