The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, July 1980 - April, 1981 Page: 298
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
amount of oil extractable from a field, in the short run it cost pro-
ducers money to no obvious advantage. Their perspectives dominated
by short-run profit considerations, oil producers resisted suggestions
that they should take the necessary steps to preserve gas pressure.18
As the agency charged with conserving the state's oil and gas re-
sources, the Railroad Commission was at the center of the controversy
over gas flaring. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the three commis-
sioners and their engineering staff attempted to deal with the techno-
logical and political problems of gas conservation. This conflict placed
the commissioners in a difficult political position. To have forced "un-
economical" conservation on the industry would have incited it to
strong opposition. As politicians subject to electoral defeat, commis-
sioners were not eager to provoke hostility from this, their basic con-
stituency. Until 1947, consequently, the various commissioners treated
the problem of gas gingerly. The Commission's engineers, however,
worked for two decades to eliminate the waste of gas, and finally
created a political momentum that succeeded in making the Commis-
sion move decisively to stop the flaring.'9
In the 1930s, the Railroad Commission employed less than twenty
engineers to oversee Texas's 75,000 wells in more than 500 fields. These
men had many jobs relating to oil; in regard to gas, their chief task lay
in trying to enforce the Commission's rules about "gas/oil ratios."20
In 1899, the state legislature had passed a comprehensive conservation
law, later amended several times, in which the flaring of unassociated
gas from a gas well was prohibited. In 1925 the legislature passed
another law permitting the flaring of associated (casinghead) gas from
an oil well. In theory, the Railroad Commission's task in enforcing
these statutes was easy: it should prohibit the flaring of gas from gas
wells but not from oil wells. In practice, however, the two laws created
a regulatory nightmare.21
18Ibid.
loIbid. For the principal statutes empowering the Railroad Commission to conserve
the state's petroleum resources, see Tex. Rev. Civ. Stat. Ann. art. 6oo8-6oo8b, 6014-6014a,
6o15, 6o016, 6017, 6o018, 6o29-6o2ga, 6o49-6049e (Vernon).
20Interviews; Ernest O. Thompson, "Texas Resources," speech to State Convention,
Texas Real Estate Boards, Oct. 7, 1937, Railroad Commission Collection.
211899 Tex. Gen. Laws ch. 49, 3; Tex. Rev. Civ. Stat. 6oo8, 6014 (1925); 1933 Tex. Gen.
Laws ch. loo, 1; Barth P. Walker, "What Is an Oil Well? What Is a Gas Well? What
Difference Does It Make?" Southwestern Legal Foundation, P oceedings of the Four-
teenth Annual Institute on Oil and Gas Law and Taxatzon (Albany, 1963), 175-232;298
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, July 1980 - April, 1981, periodical, 1980/1981; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101225/m1/346/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.