Texas's rig count bottomed at 229 in December 2025 and has climbed back to 282, and Karr Ingham says none of that recovery happens without the war the US fought with Iran that began in February 2026.
Most of the show's own framing treats the new US deal with Venezuela as a supply win. Ingham, an economist who runs Texas's main oil and gas trade group, argues the opposite: the more that deal succeeds, the lower prices should go — and he calls that a win for consumers, not a threat to Texas producers.
"$89 billion liability hanging out there. So renewable energy ain't so renewable and it makes the oil and gas industry as we talk about orphan wells look like it's already got a process."
Ingham is president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, the state's main independent oil and gas trade group, and spent three years as a farm-and-ranch radio broadcaster in the Texas Panhandle before he became an economist.
I listened to the full episode so you can skip it. 54 minutes of audio, 17 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 arguments that matter.
👤 Guest: Karr Ingham, an oil and gas economist and president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers
🎙️ Hosts: Stu Turley, CEO and President of Sandstone Group, an energy data and finance consultancy, and host of the Energy News Beat podcast; and Rey Trevino, president of Pecos Country Operating and host of the Crude Truth podcast, which co-published this episode
📰 Published: 10 September 2026, on YouTube (Energy News Beat Podcast)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 54 min | ✅ Time saved: 40 min
Key Takeaways
Texas's rig count has climbed from 229 to 282 since the Iran war began, reversing a three-year decline
Production kept climbing through the whole three-year slide, which Ingham calls extraordinary efficiency
Ingham says the heavy lifting on US production is already done, so a further supply shock — not a shortage — is the real risk ahead
Texas alone went from roughly 1 million barrels a day to nearly 6 million in about 15 years
The Venezuela deal secures 65 billion barrels over 25 years, and Ingham expects it to push prices lower once it's flowing, not higher
He doesn't expect meaningful volumes out of the country for a year or more, given the state of its infrastructure
The US exports its own light sweet crude and imports heavier grades, because American refineries were mostly built for the wrong kind of oil
Crude imports have fallen from 60–65% of US usage two decades ago to roughly 10% today
Only about 1.5% of US crude imports move through the Strait of Hormuz, which is why Turley says the chokehold barely touches US refineries even as it moves the global price
Ingham is anti-tariff "under any set of circumstances," including against Canada, and calls a tariff a tax on the consumers of the country that imposes it
Trevino pushes back with the history of tariffs on US goods since 1975 and calls sanctions a form of tariff that has weakened the dollar
Wind turbines carry an estimated $89 billion in unfunded teardown liability, with 40% of the US fleet nearing the end of its life within five years
Ingham says there is currently no process to take them down and recycle them, unlike oil and gas's orphan-well rules
1. The Rig Count Turns
Turley opened with his own rundown of how fast the global oil map has moved, framed as the article he'd written that morning.
China is stuck buying from Russia at elevated prices, and it has lost its position in Venezuela. Turley said the "Monroe Doctrine" is effectively back in force now that Nicolás Maduro has been captured, and that Secretary Chris Wright has signed a new deal opening Venezuela to investment from Chevron, ExxonMobil and others — what President Trump called "the deal of the century"
Iraq's exports to China have nearly disappeared. Turley said Iraq's volume into China has "dropped to almost zero," a fraction of what it sold in the past
Drones have taken out Russia's refining capacity. Turley said Russia's refineries have all been hit, and that even after repairs the country's capacity remains well below normal and it has effectively stopped exporting refined product
A global diesel shortage has pushed crack spreads to an all-time high, on top of the crude-side disruption — Turley called it an upstream crisis layered on top of a downstream one
Turley then asked Ingham how Texas responds to all of it. Trevino, introducing the question, noted that Ingham has "been seeing these things for years"
Ingham's answer started with the state's own numbers.
Texas's rig count peaked after COVID in January 2023, then fell for three straight years — even as production kept climbing. "Rig count gets up to its post-COVID peak in January of 2023 and then embarks on a steady and significant three-year decline." He called the combination of falling rigs and rising output "extraordinary," attributing it to continued gains in drilling productivity and efficiency
Prices weren't expected to move much in 2026 until the US went to war with Iran in late February. Ingham said that event, whatever anyone thinks of the decision to fight it, is "singularly responsible" for the year's higher crude prices
It took a few months for drillers to respond. He said he was fielding questions in early March about when activity would pick up, and told people it was too soon to expect a reaction. By April and May, Texas's rig count had stabilized and then turned up sharply, and it has kept climbing since — largely in the Permian, but with rigs appearing elsewhere in the state too
Employment is recovering with it. Texas oil and gas had shed more than 11,000 jobs over roughly a year; the industry started adding jobs back in 2026 after losing them through late 2024 and 2025
On the state's own rig-count tracker, Texas is at 282 rigs, up one on the week and 41 over the same week a year ago. Ingham said the monthly average bottomed around 229 in December 2025
2. The Work Is Already Done
Before crediting drillers with rescuing consumers from higher prices, Ingham made the case that most of the growth story is already behind the industry.
Texas has gone from roughly a million barrels a day to nearly six million over about 15 years, alongside a national run from five or six million barrels a day to a figure Ingham put at close to 14 million now
He rejects the idea that producers owe consumers another leap in output. "So again, the work has already been done by these guys and to suggest that they ought to come along and be the savior now or that they're somehow failing us the consuming public by not growing production more rapidly at this point is pure nonsense."
He was careful not to wave away the pain: "Now, crude oil prices are higher, gasoline prices are higher. The impact to consumers is there. And it's real." His point is what the alternative would look like — a market with five or six million barrels a day of US supply instead of nearly 14 million, at the same moment Iran, Iraq and Venezuela barrels are all constrained
He expects incremental growth from here, not another million-barrel-a-day leap: production is now mature, and additions will come in smaller increments
3. Venezuela's 65B Barrels
Trevino framed the Venezuela story with his own market call from February.
"I recall that I'm on record back in February at NAPE, which I hope to be interviewing you again at this year, Karr, but saying we weren't going to get higher than $62 oil all year long." He noted the Iran conflict began within a week of that call
He tied the moment to a new US deal securing 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil over 25 years, alongside Maduro's arrest, and asked how it changes Texas's production and refining picture
Ingham's answer treated the deal as a long-run supply addition rather than an immediate one.
More supply eventually means lower prices, not higher — "economics 101." He said members of his trade group have raised concern about additional Venezuelan barrels reaching Texas refineries and competing there, and he doesn't dispute the mechanism: more supply against a given demand curve pushes prices down over time, which in turn can cool drilling activity
The benefit flows to consumers, which he treats as the whole point of the business. "There's a lot to be said for liberating 300 billion barrels of oil for the benefit of the global marketplace going forward"
He doesn't expect real volumes for a year or more. Venezuela's oil infrastructure is, in his words, "in a bit of a shambles" after years of underinvestment, and getting 65 billion barrels flowing over 25 years is not something that starts immediately. "That beginning to happen is not immediate"
Texas and independent US companies may pick up work in Venezuela alongside the majors, which Ingham also counts as a benefit
The deal is priced sensitively. "We don't produce as much crude oil at $60 a barrel as we do $90 a barrel," he said — flagging that how much Venezuelan supply actually materializes will depend on where prices sit once it's investable
4. The New Supply Map
Turley put up a chart of pre-conflict production shares for the three countries at the center of the story.
"There's Iran at 3.5 million. This is pre Hormuz numbers. So, post-Maduro-capture, pre-Strait-of-Hormuz, Iran was 3.5 million barrels per day. 90% of that was going to China. Iraq was 4.4 million barrels per day. Venezuela was up to 1 million barrels per day. That was a gigantic increase."
Turley credited Energy Secretary Chris Wright with the diplomacy behind the Venezuela deal, calling him "the single greatest energy Secretary we've ever had," and framed the deal as a long-term strategic win wrapped in a short-term political one for President Trump
Ingham agreed on the substance: the deal creates a secure environment for the investment needed to rebuild Venezuela's oil fields, which he said had been left to decay under "socialism." The stated target is another million barrels a day of Venezuelan production next year — a million barrels, in his framing, that no longer has to move through a chokepoint
On the Strait of Hormuz itself, Turley and Ingham corrected an earlier estimate downward.
Only about 20% of US crude imports come from Canada, and the Strait of Hormuz accounts for a far smaller slice — roughly 1.5%, not the 2% Turley first cited. Ingham said the last figure he'd seen put it "maybe around one and a half percent-ish"
The exposure runs through global pricing rather than direct US imports. "It does have an impact though because crude oil prices are globally set not domestically set. And so when you're choking off wherever it's going in the world, when you're choking off the movement of that much crude oil and maybe 15 to 20 million barrels a day at its worst in terms of crude oil and product, it does have an effect on price and that's why crude oil prices are 90 or 100 bucks now as opposed to 50 or 60."
Turley used the low direct-import share to needle California's energy politics, since the state imports oil from Russia, Ecuador and the Strait of Hormuz corridor itself
5. Sweet Out, Heavy In
Turley raised one of the more counterintuitive pieces of the US oil trade: the country exports large volumes of its own crude while continuing to import from elsewhere.
Not all crude is alike, and US refineries were mostly built for the wrong kind. Venezuelan and Canadian oil-sands crude is heavy and sour; Permian crude is light and sweet. Refineries built decades ago, when Canada was the largest single import source, were tooled for the heavier grade
That mismatch is why the US exports so much of its own oil rather than using all of it at home. Ingham said light sweet Permian crude is "really refined more majority over the world than it is here in America," because the domestic refining base wasn't built to handle it
A new refinery is planned in Brownsville, which Trevino said the Texas Alliance helped secure, along with a possible pipeline bringing Permian — and potentially Colorado and Wyoming — crude to it for processing
Crude imports have fallen from 60–65% of US usage two decades ago to roughly 10% today. Ingham called it "an extraordinary outcome" on the path to something close to energy independence, which he was careful to define as not requiring zero imports — free trade, he said, still benefits consumers
Lifting the crude-oil export ban in late 2015 was the precondition for all of it. Before that, US producers legally could not sell their own crude abroad
Trevino framed the whole build-out as a generational investment story, noting how many family offices sit inside the Texas Alliance's membership and describing US investors as comparatively spoiled by how quickly they see returns next to overseas plays like Venezuela
6. The Tariff Disagreement
Turley asked whether the Venezuela deal and a cooling Iran conflict might bring Canada back to the negotiating table on tariffs. Ingham used it to state a position he said puts him in the minority among people he knows.
"I take a different view of the tariff situation than pretty much everybody I know. Which is to say I'm anti-tariff under any set of circumstances."
"We American consumers should benefit from unrestricted trade." Most economists across history, he said, have understood that a tariff functions as a tax on the consumers of the country imposing it — whatever benefit it hands a favored domestic industry
He doesn't expect Canadian crude to lose its importance to US refiners, though a market shift — not a tariff — could gradually displace some of it if enough new supply resembling Canadian grades reaches the market
He was blunt about Ottawa too: the Canadian government's handling of its own oil and gas sector, he said, has been "every bit as bad" as the prior US administration's
Trevino, who had teed up a running dispute between Ontario premier Doug Ford and US energy links — a $6 billion Canadian hydro connection into New York City that Ford has threatened to cut, and Enbridge's Line 5, which can carry gasoline and diesel leverage back the other way — pushed back on the free-trade framing itself.
"Tariffs have been on US goods up to 200% since I was in high school in 1975. They've had tariffs on us this entire time. Tariffs work when they're managed correctly and not used as a weaponization."
"The US dollar has been supported by the US petro dollar and the previous five administrations have weaponized the US dollar to almost its demise through weaponization of sanctions which is almost a tariff when you look at it."
Both agreed the underlying question is what actually serves consumers and investors, even while landing in different places on tariffs themselves
7. Wind Turbines' $89B Bill
With a couple of minutes left, Ingham raised a subject the hosts hadn't teed up: the looming cost of retiring wind turbines.
The US has about 79,000 wind turbines, and roughly 40% of them are approaching the end of their working life within the next three to five years. Ingham said there is currently no process in place to take them down and recycle them
He put the resulting liability at $89 billion. "So renewable energy ain't so renewable and it makes the oil and gas industry as we talk about orphan wells look like it's already got a process"
He credited the Railroad Commission of Texas with managing the state's own orphan-well problem reasonably well by comparison, calling it a "really good job keeping a wrangle on all that mess"
Bonus Insights
Ingham was in Chicago the day of the taping for a Heartland Institute event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the economist Tom Woods, and described Heartland as the organization that has fought the climate-change narrative head-on, without fear. He credited a Heartland geologist's past appearance at his own group's conference with debunking guilt narratives around oil and gas production
The Texas Alliance of Energy Producers has rebranded its main annual event as the Upstream Policy Conference, running November 9–10 in Fort Worth at the Crescent Hotel
Before becoming an oil and gas economist, Ingham spent three years as a farm-and-ranch radio broadcaster and one year in television in the Texas Panhandle, then worked for a US congressman from the Panhandle before returning to school for economics
The Texas Alliance keeps its own lobbyist in Washington and is preparing for the 2027 Texas legislative session, where produced water, orphan wells and well-plugging rules are on its list. Ingham referenced a recent conversation with outgoing Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright on produced water, published on the Crude Truth Substack
Trevino teased a coming appearance from sitting Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian
Ingham's bottom line is that the buildout in Texas and US production has already done its work, and every barrel still coming — whether from more American drilling or a slow trickle out of Venezuela — points toward lower prices for consumers rather than higher ones.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Texas Alliance of Energy Producers (The state trade group Ingham runs; its November conference and its Washington lobbying operation both came up)
The Heartland Institute (The free-market think tank Ingham was in Chicago to see, credited with challenging climate-change orthodoxy)
Chevron and ExxonMobil (Named as the majors positioned to invest in Venezuela under the new US-brokered deal)
Sandstone Group (Stu Turley's energy data and finance consultancy)
Pecos Country Operating (Rey Trevino's oil and gas company, referred to on air as "POS Energy")
Enbridge (Operator of Line 5, cited by Trevino as US leverage in the dispute with Ontario over Canadian hydro power)
Railroad Commission of Texas (Regulates Texas oil and gas, including orphan wells — Ingham's point of comparison for the wind-turbine liability)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Energy News Beat — episode page (The show's own notes for this episode, co-published with the Crude Truth podcast)
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