US regulator who became the face of shale in oil wars

Bloomberg

In just a matter of weeks, Ryan Sitton went from being a lame-duck commissioner of an obscure Texas agency to one of the key figures in a global effort to save the oil market from plummeting prices.
Sitton, a Republican who lost the primary election for his own seat on the Texas Railroad
Commission just one month ago, said that he had spoken with Russian energy minister Alexander Novak about cutting global oil supplies and planned to have a conversation with Novak’s counterpart in Saudi Arabia. Two weeks ago, he spoke with Opec Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo and was invited to attend a meeting this summer in Vienna.
To be clear, these kinds of exchanges between state-level regulators and national energy ministers about capping global oil supplies are not common. In fact, if Sitton attends that Opec meeting, he would be the first member of the state Railroad Commission to do so since the 1980s. He’s earning a seat at the table just as the Opec+ alliance, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, tries to form a global coalition to cut output, put an end to a war over market share and stem the rout in crude prices brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
A deal with non-Opec+ nations including the US would set a historic precedent.
President Donald Trump hasn’t publicly said whether the US is willing to cut its own domestic production. He met with oil executives at the White House to discuss ways to shore up the industry.
In the absence of federal
action, Sitton — an oil and gas engineer and self-proclaimed energy markets expert who leaves office in January — became the face of America’s response to a global battle for oil market share.
Even before crude collapsed amid the virus and a Saudi-Russia price war, Sitton was in the public eye far more often than his fellow commissioners, Chairman Wayne Christian and Christi Craddick, both Republicans. He regularly appears on television and has his own website, ryansitton.com, where visitors can view everything from his annual oil industry report to a video of a Crossfit class he led for state employees.
To a certain degree, Sitton’s always had an eye on the global market.
“Other nations are flaring at levels four times higher than Texas,” he said in the report, which was panned by environmental groups.
“They, therefore, present much more efficient paths to global flaring reductions.”
The power to manage the state’s oil production has been there all along. Following a slump in the oil market in 1931, the Texas Railroad Commission started periodically implementing a process known as pro-rationing to bolster prices. That ended in the early 1970s, just as OPEC, which had modeled itself on the commission, was rising to a dominant position in the
oil market.