A quick report for the last two weeks.

Of most interest is the meeting we had with Governor Burgum.  The meeting lasted for almost 90 minutes, during which the first 30 minutes we spent on a recap of how we got to the point we are now in the industry—the Enhance, Preserve, Protect strategic planning, the Clean Power Plan, etc. Once we felt like he understood where we were coming from, we presented the types of solutions we have been speaking of as a board for more than a year.  He asked a lot of questions that indicate his interest in R&D and experience in the transformation that can follow successful breakthroughs, as well as some potential concerns that we will have to be aware of.  First, is the continual challenge of getting policy makers to understand how big of a project we are talking about (and we have two legitimate projects right now).  Our working group has been comparing this more and more to rural water projects, since legislators are familiar with the cost and scale of such projects, as well as the fact that they are state funded.  But Governor Burgum also is very focused on the “return” of the state’s investment, the size of the potential markets for our identified technologies, and is very much looking at what we are doing from an “investment” perspective.  We will need to describe our project in terms that he is comfortable with, and help him understand that this isn’t a “startup” that will take $100M of the state’s money and turn it into a $10B return, with a stream of royalties for 20 years.
Also of note is his focus on collaboration.  He asked many questions about how we, as an industry, collaborate on R&D.  He wants us to work together—and I think the more he learns about our R&D endeavors the more he will appreciate that we do a pretty good job of working together.

A word about your government relations folks—they were specifically called out as being very helpful to him.  (This isn’t self serving, btw, because your folks have interacted with him more than I have.)  He complimented our industry as being very helpful, up front and not simply trying to “sell” him on projects.  I think we have done a good job of portraying our efforts as a “partnership” with the state, and not simply a handout or subsidy to the coal industry.
Our next efforts are to ensure the funding bills are left intact and begin responding to the messaging challenges we identified after our meeting with Governor Burgum.
In other news, Mike Holmes attended a hearing regarding coal technologies, complete video here: http://mnsenate.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=1071

We are rolling out the results of our economic impact study, and have a small advertising campaign on both radio and social media.  We are supplementing that this year with something we have not ever done before.  We compared the lignite tax revenues to the budget for each higher education institution to understand the scale of our industry.  We can then push the ads (one is attached) into extremely targeted groups of people so our economic impact is better understood. We have several of these microtargeted ads running and will roll out new ones consistently.

This week we will go out to dinner with more legislators to talk about our R&D efforts, and attend additional hearings.  We are in the midst of the effort to break the Health Department’s Environmental Section into its own Cabinet Level agency and are working with the Petroleum Council and our environmental managers group to provide good feedback.

In the federal world, the Stream Protection Rule was struck down by Congress.  We worked very closely with Senator Heitkamp on her efforts, and provided the material she used in her flood speech, as well as private material she used on the floor as she had conversations.

We then added an Op-Ed about this to rebut a lot of the lies and propaganda from the left about this rule and are underway with a campaign to correct the record and thank our representatives.  You can read what we wrote here: http://secureenergyfuture.org/end-of-a-rule/#sthash.w1xqxS53.dpuf
Wind taxes and credits continue to simmer, but there has been little direct activity or engagement from me or Tyler.