This week on Mining Money, Brandon Davis, CEO, Tim Travis and Imran Khan of Swan Energy talk about how the November national election will impact the energy industry. From prices to shale play USA, different angles and perspectives are shared.
Jason Spiess: Thank you gentlemen, for joining us today. We’re going to go right to the mailbag today in our Mining Money segment here, and we want to find out what’s going on. You know, this, I get this probably emailed more than anything, uh, is this ESG movement. I’ve talked to some operators; one of them mentioned they were switching their ESG report, part of their annual shareholder deal, from 45 pages to 90 pages. I’ve talked to bankers that say that, oh yeah, you need it, but they don’t know how to implement it. I-I just got a email this morning from a professor down at Texas A&M that was debunking this whole ESG movement. So, you got, you know, BP and Exxon and the big guys trying to talk about the ESG movement, but on the other side, deals are still needing to be done and financing still needs to be be had. I got kind of intrigued last week when you brought up this great bank loan you got from, uh, or this-this rate that you got to do some financing. That’s been a big problem for people, so I thought we’d kind of mesh the two together, see what your guys’ thought is about this ESG movement. Because you guys are out there getting deals done when a lot of people can’t and that’s really important right now. So, I don’t know, uh, which one of you wants to take the ESG baton first, but ESG stands for environmental, uh, social governance and it is a very new sort of a movement that’s kind of, in my opinion, being led by a 16-year-old girl, so you guys can handle that.
Brandon Davis: I-I’ll take, I’ll take it first, and thank you for telling me what it means, because I’ve never really heard of it before, um, this conversation. I guess I have heard of it from people asking, but I had no idea what they were asking about and, uh, the last part of that, we-we— Say what the ‘S’ means again.
Jason Spiess: Uh, environmental social governance, so like a social cause.
Brandon Davis: Well, I-I-I own my company, um, and there’s no social governance happening here nor will it ever, so I don’t care, and if people don’t like me and they don’t like what we do, they don’t have to do business with us. It’s that simple. Um, companies that are corporate and changing, you know, doubling the size of their annual report, based on what you’re saying, to accommodate this, that’s insane. And I don’t know, I-I, uh, the oil and gas industry has become very environmentally friendly over the years, um, and-and-and more so than most industry, um, and for additional pressure to be put on for more environmentally, um, and socially acceptable things, I just, I-I’m not, I’m not into it. I don’t get it, I don’t understand it, and I honestly don’t give a shit. What do you think, Imran?
Imran Khan: You know, it’s-it’s all about the, uh, environmentally challenged.
Brandon Davis: [Laughter]
Imran Khan: Is what I, you know, it’s-it’s good to see these different companies doing what they-they feel their stuff, their-their shareholders, um, want them to say and do and, you know, as Brandon just pointed out, he owns his company completely, all a hundred percent. So, there’s no shareholders, per se, that he needs to make happy around it, right? Um, yeah, it’s just one of those things you-you hear about, uh, BP and how they’re totally, uh, reinventing themselves, um,
