The recent article by Dr. Daniel Fine in the guest column of your Wednesday edition concerning the impacts of Saudi Arabian-led dismantlement of our lively domestic energy business via flooding the market with underpriced foreign crude from numerous Middle Eastern national oil companies along with other foreign producers like bad actor Venezuelan and Russian puppet oil regime cronies are making for difficulty in our New Mexican oil patch.

The impacts to the New Mexico state revenues derived from the lower prices have been enormous in their impacts to the current New Mexico administration and the state budgeters working through our elected representatives in the Statehouse.

The emotions of which program to slice out of the budget and all the unintended consequences derived from the Saudi Arabian led OPEC/non-OPEC producer groups acting to undermine our energy security is disappointing in the least and should be addressed at the highest level in the current administration in Washington D.C.

Hopefully, an investigation at the Department of Commerce will determine that the domestic industry is being harmed and the administration will implement quotas that would prevent foreign light crude from being “dumped on the market” and eventually foreign sour crude sweet would also be added for consideration for quotas.

The president is in Europe trying to convince the heads of various European governments that the USA can provide them with LNG (natural gas) to wean themselves gradually off of unreliable and politically unstable Russian natural gas; we should have learned long ago that the Middle East nationalized- producers have no interest in promoting our national interest of energy security and they have kept our country depending on them for our transportation and refining needs for decades.

This fits well with the likes of the large integrated oil companies that we are all familiar with who make money all along the value chain. The consumer would be well-served in the long run if we weaned ourselves off the undependable foreign sources of oil and promoted the domestic industry with these quotas on foreign crude.

This happened in the period of time of the mid-50s through the early 70s last century. President Eisenhower made a presidential proclamation to the effect and put quotas on foreign crude (traveling in oil tankers from foreign fields) to protect our national domestic industry because of national energy security.

Dr. Daniel Fine makes the point that those larger entities (multi-national oil companies that are public) in the integrated companies oppose this structure, they have been part of the problem we face coming up with a plausible energy policy.

May I recommend that you regularly have Dr. Daniel Fine make his comments in your guest column to educate your readers to illustrate the difficulties derived from these foreign-national oil companies trying to undermine our energy security by flooding the market with their crude.

Actually, foreign steelmakers were punished by previous administrations because they were “dumping their steel” in our markets and that industry was protected and remains protected.

These steel products are a major cost item in our industry and are significant cost-drivers in drilling and equipping wells, and if this industry (the steel industry) is being protected from the dumping by quotas, so also should the domestic oil industry. Thank you for this consideration.

John A. Yates Jr.

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