The rhetoric certainly has been impressive. In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama vowed to “clear away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects.” He issued an executive order to make the process faster and more efficient in order to help “maintain our Nation’s competitive edge.”

Last month, the White House announced that the administration’s efforts were “cutting red tape and shaving months, and even years, off the time it takes to review and approve major infrastructure projects.” The administration even set up a Federal Infrastructure Projects Permitting Dashboard, which supposedly “provides an unprecedented level of transparency into the Federal permitting and review process.”

Shovel-ready projects kept at bay

Sounds great, but not everyone seems to have gotten the memos. How else to explain the delay and inaction coming from Washington on permitting for a number of massive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects that are just waiting for a federal thumbs up?

The best example, of course, is the Keystone XL pipeline, about which I’ve written many times before. Thousands of construction jobs would be created immediately, if only the administration would give approval to a project that its own State Department recommends.  And don’t forget that the president’s first National Security Advisor argues Keystone XL would enhance America’s national security.

Another example that has come into view recently is the extremely slow approach taken by the Department of Energy to process liquefied natural gas (LNG) export applications. DOE has moved on just two applications for exports to non-free trade agreement countries, waiting two years between rulings. Twenty more applications remain mired in Washington’s bureaucratic morass, including Golden Pass Products, a proposed project on the Texas Gulf Coast in which ExxonMobil is a partner.

DOE recently has vowed to pick up the pace in processing approvals. But even their new suggested pace for processing approvals is too slow. As ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson noted last week, delays are costing U.S. companies millions of dollars each day, while eroding the competitive edge the president vowed to maintain.

The irony of the federal government’s slow-walk approach to export applications is that a DOE-commissioned report concluded that higher export levels will stimulate more production and better help the economy. A subsequent study showed that LNG exports could generate huge numbers of new jobs. But all that good news will be for naught if the federal government won’t act.

“Your search yielded no results”

For all the smart talk out of Washington about cutting red tape, what speaks loudest might just be the White House’s Permitting Dashboard, designed to take transparency into permitting and review to new levels.

To some degree it succeeds. Type “Keystone” or “LNG” into the Dashboard’s search engine.

What comes up?

“Your search yielded no results.”

This needs to change.  It isn’t a good sign for an administration that has pledged to cut timelines in half for major infrastructure projects. Nor is it a good sign for the economy overall.

That comes from the federal government’s own Energy Information Administration. In a new report, EIA reveals that oil and gas production from federal lands – including coastal waters – reached a ten-year low in 2012.

Last year, sales of crude oil from federal lands fell more than 5 percent compared to the year before. “In contrast,” EIA notes, “total U.S. crude oil production (from public and private lands) increased by 15 percent.”

Perhaps more ominously, sales of oil produced from federal properties have fallen 18 percent from the 2010 level.

The drop-off is even more significant offshore, where the majority of U.S. production from federal lands occurs. Sales of oil produced from federal waters plummeted 23 percent from a peak of 615 million barrels in 2010.

A major contributor, of course, are the actions taken by the current administration in the wake of BP’s 2010 oil spill to slow the pace of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s hard to see those numbers improving any time soon. The federal government’s new 2012-2017 offshore leasing plan keeps the vast majority of U.S. offshore areas off-limits for energy development, including the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, nearly all of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and most Alaskan waters.

The administration’s plan replaces a previous proposal that would have opened up parts of the Atlantic Coast for responsible energy development, and offered the possibility that the Eastern Gulf of Mexico would be opened as well.

Under the administration’s updated plan, more than 85 percent of U.S. offshore areas remain off-limits. No other country prohibits its own economic development like this.

Last summer then- Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar declared, “Two years removed from the spill, the Gulf of Mexico is back in business.”

The government’s own data show otherwise.

America’s federal lands are owned by the American people.  And the U.S. energy industry has proven that with our rapidly advancing technologies we can safely and responsibly produce energy almost anywhere.

After years of waiting, it is time to give us the opportunity to invest, create jobs, and generate revenue from our shared resources.

Safe, reliable energy has long been regarded strategically as vital to our national security.  In my home state we are crazy in love with our blueberries, but we have never said that blueberries are a key part of America’s national security arsenal.  So energy is different.  In addition, right now the future of America’s natural gas is uniquely intertwined with America’s overall economic future.  To make things and grow things in America, our country needs affordable energy. (emphasis mine)

I respectfully disagree with Chairman Wyden that when it comes to free trade, energy is different.  It is not. Energy is fundamental to our economy, but that doesn’t make it independent of economics.

Energy certainly is more important than blueberries … or most any other commodity that is traded globally. It is more important in terms of national security and economic security. On that we all agree.

Responding equally to market forces 

But those realities don’t change the fact that energy products are no different in how they respond to the basic and organic market forces of supply and demand.

Simply put, government efforts to manipulate oil and natural gas markets – in this case by limiting natural gas exports – will carry economic consequences.

Interventions in energy markets have been tried before for a host of reasons, including energy and economic security. They never help consumers. Consider:

• Price controls on oil and gasoline in the 1970s only exacerbated serious problems, leading to supply shortages that forced consumers to wait hours in long lines at filling stations.
• In 2001, price controls on retail electricity rates in California helped lead to rolling blackouts.
• More recently, Washington’s efforts to mandate the use of ethanol in the nation’s automotive fuel supply have created economic consequences and inefficiencies across the economy.

Exports serving strategic aims

Finally, I’ll point out that the numerous studies about the economy-wide benefits of American natural gas exports have taken into account the question of energy supplies and prices. They repeatedly have found that ample and growing natural gas supply is waiting for markets and that prices are unlikely to rise significantly with increased exports, thus demonstrating the readiness of markets to provide the reliable energy supplies Sen. Wyden aims to guarantee.

Those studies also highlight that exports will actually stimulate production of additional gas supplies, and in the process stimulate the economy with multi-billion-dollar investments, growth in GDP and revenues to governments and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Perhaps that’s why a strong majority of economists polled by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently agreed with the statement, “Restricting U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas would have adverse effects on the U.S. economy.”

And it hints at why former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon both have expounded recently on the national security benefits – to the United States and to its allies – of expanded global trade in all products, including energy.

Their advice is worth its weight in blueberries.

While those numbers are impressive, they can seem a bit abstract and impersonal. So I am glad to be able to highlight a story that breaks it all down in a way that puts a human face on how energy production is transforming the U.S. economy.

On Friday, ExxonMobil announced a $500,000 grant to underwrite a technology job-training program in the greater Houston area that will help develop the workers to staff a rapidly expanding petrochemical industry. This comes just a few months after prospects for a “major workforce shortage” were discussed at the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers annual meeting.

ExxonMobil Chemical Company president Steve Pryor, quoted in a front-page Houston Chronicle story, noted: “There are literally thousands of new jobs coming to the Houston area and across the Gulf Coast being created because of what I think of as a tidal wave of new investment created for the chemical industry. …  It’s lots of jobs and at the heart of them, to enable all of these (projects) to happen, you need skilled workers.”

More than 400 chemical plants and refineries on the Gulf Coast comprise the world’s largest concentration of petrochemical manufacturing. Recent capacity additions announced by ExxonMobil and other companies make clear the need for more skilled workers in coming years.  That’s why Friday’s announcement makes sense. And it’s particularly welcome news given the specter of unemployment continuing to haunt many parts of the U.S. economy.

The program announced Friday will build on one ExxonMobil already has in place with Baytown’s Lee College. It will draw in other local academic institutions to train students seeking certification or completion of degree programs for instrumentation, electrical, machinist/millwright, welding, pipefitting and other skills and competencies needed by the chemical industry.

These are high-paying jobs; the average salary in the chemical industry is $86,000 per year, which is 40 percent higher than the national average for manufacturing.

We anticipate more than 50,000 students and educators will benefit over the next five years from this new program and from the continuation of our other job-training programs.

More details are available at a new website – www.HoustonNaturalGas.com.

Finally, don’t miss this segment above from Houston’s local FOX affiliate for the opportunity to meet one of those students. Kenneth Kossie is a military veteran whose experience with one of our programs has set him up for a potential career with ExxonMobil. We’re investing in people like Kenneth, and in doing so we are investing in America’s future.

So it was nice to see growing recognition of the tax burden shouldered by the oil and gas industry in The New York Times recently.

In a graphic feature entitled “Across U.S. Companies, Tax Rates Vary Greatly,” the paper examined the federal, state, local and foreign income tax payments from 2007 to 2012 for all companies in the S&P 500.

“The big energy firms paid the most taxes in absolute terms.”

The Times’ conclusion? “The big energy firms paid the most taxes in absolute terms: Exxon $146 billion; Chevron $85 billion; and ConocoPhillips $58 billion.” The Times echoes a March feature in USA Today that noted the “extraordinary amounts” of taxes paid by large companies like ours.

The energy industry also has the highest income tax rate.

The Times’ feature computed the effective income tax rate of the energy industry to be 37 percent, driven by the contributions of the largest oil and gas companies. That 37 percent is well above the average S&P 500 tax rate of about 29 percent. (The paper notes that “one of every seven companies had an effective tax rate lower than ten percent.”)

When you add in the additional income tax liabilities for those years, but which are due in a later period, and our share of equity company income taxes, which The Times feature ignores, ExxonMobil’s effective income tax rate was 45 percent and our total income tax expenses were $190 billion.

Sticklers may point out that The Times says the insurance industry overall has a higher effective tax rate of 51 percent. That is technically true but, the paper notes, that figure is a fluke. That’s because the mammoth losses suffered by a number of insurers since the financial crisis (e.g. $83 billion in losses for AIG) have ended up distorting the overall industry rate. The reality is that “many insurers pay lower-than-average rates,” and only two relatively small insurance companies in the S&P 500 had effective tax rates higher than that of the energy industry.

What our critics often miss

Kudos to The New York Times for highlighting what our critics – including the newspaper’s own editorial page writers – often miss: that our industry makes a tremendous contribution to government revenues. In addition to the income taxes noted above, our business activities contributed over $435 billion more to government coffers in other tax revenues during that same 2007-2012 period.

Those payments come on top of the huge capital investments companies like ExxonMobil make every year, investments that mean jobs and economic activity all over the world.

Counting tax expenses, capital spending and the like, ExxonMobil’s direct economic contribution to the U.S. economy in 2012 alone was $68 billion. That comes to $1.3 billion per week, and we’re proud of that.

We are even prouder that we help provide the supplies of energy that keep the modern economy moving.

That conventional wisdom was flipped on its head last week with the announcement that a bipartisan group of senators has joined together to break a legislative deadlock on chemical safety reform.

The result is the proposed Chemical Safety Improvement Act (CSIA), which already has received positive reviews from the American Chemistry Council as well as environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families.

Updating an old regulatory model

The nation’s chemical industry currently is governed largely by the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a federal statute that has grown increasingly antiquated in the nearly four decades since President Ford signed it into law in 1976.

The agreement announced last week by a bipartisan grouping of leaders on Capitol Hill provides hope of bringing the chemical industry’s regulatory structure into line with the 21^st century realities of an industry that employs more than 800,000 people and whose products are found in 96 percent of all manufactured goods.

While TSCA has worked well enough since it was first passed, there is little question that our federal government’s approach to chemical regulation could work far better. The fact that chemical management regulations in other countries and regions take their cues from the U.S. regulatory system provides added impetus to make sure ours is up to date.

Science- and risk-based regulation

The Chemical Safety Improvement Act will do just that. It modernizes the regulatory system with a science-based, risk-based approach to chemical regulation. It will provide the Environmental Protection Agency with improved tools and flexibility to make chemical regulation smarter.

At the same time, the CSIA will create a strong, coherent national chemical regulatory program that gives states opportunities for input while preventing the confusion that a patchwork of laws at various levels might produce.

The CSIA also addresses a feature of the 1976 TSCA law that has drawn its share of criticism over the years: namely, the provision that grandfathered thousands of chemicals that were already on the market from undergoing an EPA review.

Under the new law, all grandfathered chemicals still in commerce today will be subject to a clear, systematic evaluation process to assess safety. This will go a long way to reestablishing confidence in the safety of chemicals as well as in the federal government’s oversight of the industry.

CSIA still has some hurdles to clear before it becomes law, and there’s no guarantee it will pass during the current session of Congress. But there’s no doubt that this agreement, which the Chicago Tribune calls ”a rare display of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill,” represents a step in the right direction.

Our new Corporate Citizenship Report details how we do that safely and responsibly as we work to provide affordable, reliable energy, which is essential for human progress.

In implementing and reporting on the safety and responsibility of our operations, our goal is not to grab headlines. Rather, we are focused on making long-term incremental improvements that drive sustainable results.

By being detailed and transparent about our efforts, we can communicate best practices and hold ourselves accountable.

To that end, a look through this year’s Corporate Citizenship Report should tell you a lot about ExxonMobil and how we operate. Let me flag just a few of the noteworthy items contained in the report:

• We’ve reduced spills to land and water by 37 percent since 2002, and we’ve reduced hydrocarbon flaring by 18 percent in Upstream operations and 43 percent in Downstream operations over the same period.
• Ninety-nine percent of our private-security contracts worldwide contain explicit language to address human rights issues.
• ExxonMobil has the industry’s only dedicated, in-house oil spill response research program.
• Global lost-time incident rates for ExxonMobil employees and contractors continue to be considerably lower than those for U.S. oil and gas sector employees as a whole.

We take the commitments, achievements and challenges outlined in our report seriously. And, while this report only comes out once a year, we work to improve our performance in these areas all year, every year. We believe that a company must manage safety, environmental, social and economic performance over the long-term in order to maintain a strong business.

After perusing our 2012 report and its key data, please let us know what you think through the feedback portal on our website.

We share Sally’s recognition that science and engineering have the power to transform lives and address the challenges of the 21st century, from energy and information to agriculture and medicine. Furthermore, our economy and America’s ability to compete globally require a workforce that has technical skills and an ability to innovate. The majority of jobs in the coming decades will require some knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Yet, far too few students are pursuing these fields of study.

We were proud to work with Sally to address this challenge.

Together, we created the Sally Ride Science Academy to prepare young people for careers in STEM-related industries. In just four years, we have helped train close to 9,000 teachers across the country who are having a positive impact in today’s classrooms, introducing students to the wonders of science and the diversity of STEM-related careers. Sally also worked with us as a founding board member of the National Math and Science Initiative.

Her dedication to STEM education will live on because the mission is so critical to our nation’s future.

In that same spirit, I was pleased to see the White House’s announcement that President Obama intends to award Sally the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, later this year. The honor is fully deserved.

That announcement came on the same day that NASA and Sally Ride Science hosted a national tribute to Sally at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. She was honored not just for her lifelong commitment to space exploration, but for her dedication to improving science education and supporting science literacy.

Former NASA astronaut and space shuttle commander Pam Melroy summed up the significance of Sally’s contributions perfectly: “Her achievements in space inspired a generation of young women, and her achievements in STEM education will pass that legacy of inspiration on to future generations.”

ExxonMobil and Sally Ride Science produced a video about Sally’s legacy as part of the national tribute, and I invite you to watch it below.

That implication is dead wrong.

I responded to them this week in a letter you can read here. But I want to take this opportunity to highlight publicly a few points (missed by PWYP) that are germane to the issue of transparency and to the court challenge against the SEC rules. The legal challenge was filed by the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Independent Petroleum Association of America and National Foreign Trade Council.

The first, and most significant, point is that ExxonMobil believes transparency is an important and worthy goal, and we have supported efforts to promote transparency since long before Congress and the SEC took up the issue.

Since its inception more than a decade ago, we have been an active participant in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a constructive framework endorsed by the Obama administration that engages governments, business, civil society and financial institutions in a collaborative effort to improve transparency and accountability in the extractive industries sector (see video below). ExxonMobil has supported EITI implementation in countries such as Iraq, Indonesia, Chad, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, Equatorial Guinea and Azerbaijan, and in potential new applicant countries such as Australia, Colombia and Papua New Guinea.

A few other things worth considering:

• ExxonMobil supports the disclosure of government revenues from the extractives sector so long as there is sufficient aggregation of reported data to protect proprietary information and the competitiveness of individual companies.
• As currently written, the SEC’s transparency rules will disadvantage U.S.-listed companies against numerous large foreign competitors that are not bound by Dodd-Frank.
• According to the SEC’s own estimates, its rules will cost industry $1 billion upfront to establish necessary accounting systems, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars annually in compliance costs. That doesn’t include the billions of dollars of additional costs the SEC acknowledges for the lost business that could result from the regulations’ perverse directives to divulge proprietary data and to either break the law or cancel projects in countries prohibiting such detailed disclosure.
• Ostensibly designed to promote transparency, the new SEC rules will actually harm it, as countries wishing to shield detailed information from public view will simply do business only with companies not bound by Dodd-Frank (which includes the vast majority of the world’s largest oil companies, which are not publicly traded in the U.S.).

It seems to me that to have a chance of being successful, a transparency initiative at a minimum must pass three tests. It must apply to all companies. It must protect proprietary information to provide a competitive framework for the energy industry. And it must not violate host government laws or contractual obligations.

The so-called transparency rules finalized last year by the SEC fail all three tests. They will harm American businesses and American consumers while undercutting effective efforts to promote transparency that have been underway for the last decade.

Because we support transparency, as well as the principle that American businesses should not be disadvantaged by their government’s rules, ExxonMobil supports asking the judiciary to review a set of regulations that seem to run counter to the intent of Congress, as provided both under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act it passed 76 years later.

One way to advance that worthy ambition – and to give the overall economy a much-needed lift – would be for the Obama administration to give the green light to applications to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) that are presently on file with the Department of Energy.

Two new reports show just how powerful the job growth and other economic benefits would be if the federal government endorsed the same free-trade principles with respect to energy exports that it does with virtually every other product – from agriculture and aircraft to pharmaceuticals and vehicles.

The first study, conducted by consulting firm ICF International on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute, calculates that LNG exports will create huge numbers of new jobs.

ICF considered a range of scenarios and determined that the net effect on U.S. employment from LNG exports between 2016 and 2035 could range from 73,100 to as many as 452,300 total jobs with exports of 16 billion cubic feet per day. And contrary to assertions by protectionist U.S. manufacturers that oppose a market-based exports policy, manufacturing employment increases on average between 7,800 and 76,800 net jobs during the period. And that includes 1,700 to 11,400 net chemical, petrochemical and refining job gains.

Of course, manufacturing and exports mean economic benefits not just for particular industries, but for the country as a whole. The ICF study calculates that the net effect on American’s gross domestic product would be between $15.6 billion and $73.6 billion each year.

Meanwhile a study from the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBEC) provides more evidence that exports will produce broad economic benefits. It notes how small business already has prospered from the nation’s 27 percent increase in natural gas production between 2005 and 2011, particularly in terms of employment.

ExxonMobil is not a small business, but we know how important small businesses are to our economy.  Many of the people we do business with on a daily basis are with small- and medium-sized businesses. In fact, more than 90 percent of U.S. businesses involved in oil and gas extraction and handling have fewer than 500 employees.

That’s why we’re encouraged by SBEC’s conclusion: “LNG exports guided by market forces mean further expanding opportunity for small and mid-size businesses to be created, to grow and to create jobs.”

Natural gas exports would provide a big boost for American businesses big and small – and for American jobs and economic growth.