#26 | The Price of Gas and the Benefits of Giving feat. Grant Norwood & Colleen Gregerson

Practical Tax with Steve Moskowitz

On today's episode, Steve is joined by Grant Norwood, a leading voice in the oil and gas industry, to talk about energy inflation, while Colleen Gregerson of San Francisco’s legendary club, The Battery, shows the upside of charity. Episode Transcript Intro: Welcome to the Practical Tax podcast, with tax attorney Steve Moskowitz. The Practical Tax podcast is brought to you by Moskowitz, LLP, a tax law firm. Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is based upon information available as of date of recording and will not be updated for changes in law regulation. Any information is not to be considered tax advice or legal advice and does not form an attorney/client relationship. Further, this podcast may be construed as attorney advertising. You should see professional consultation for your individual tax and legal situation. Steve Moskowitz: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Practical Tax. I'm tax attorney Steve Moskowitz, and I'd like to introduce you to my co-host, Chip Franklin. Chip, take it away. Chip Franklin: Thanks, Steve. Welcome to Practical Tax, everybody. Steve's recovering a little bit from COVID, so I'll do some of the heavy lifting here at first. Today on Practical Tax, we're going to talk about the business of oil, and more to the point, why we're paying these astronomically high prices at the pump. Joining us right now is a CEO from the Norwood Energy Corporation, Grant Norwood. He joins us here. Grant, you're down in Texas now, right? Grant Norwood: Yeah. Fort Worth, Texas, actually. Chip Franklin: The Lone Star State. Steve Moskowitz: See, I think of it as a state with no income taxes. Grant Norwood: That is one of the things we're known for. Chip Franklin: All right, Grant. Can you help us here? Why is the price of oil, or gasoline for the rest of us, so high right now? I understand about market forces and supply and demand, but come on, man, seven bucks a gallon. Grant Norwood: I mean, it's a lot of supply and demand. You had the supply greatly outweigh the demand for about a year and a half. So that brought the supply down, and now that the demand's back, the supply doesn't come back that easily. So you've got some technical hurdles as far as an actual well and its production. And when it gets disrupted in its life, it just might not come back. So, I'd say about seven to eight times out of 10, it didn't hurt a thing, and sometimes even comes on a little bit stronger, but those other two or three, they don't come back. So anyways, it doesn't take much of a imbalance for the prices to greatly sway in one direction or another. Chip Franklin: So Grant and Steve, can you tell everybody why California's paying more than $2 a gallon than the rest of the country? Steve Moskowitz: So that the state of California can maintain the over $100 billion surplus, and that's something that really needs to be addressed. One of the other things, there's so much political debate about energy and environment, but tell me, Grant, with the high cost of oil, what's the status of oil and gas exploration in the United States? Grant Norwood: Well, it's a perfect storm for a lot of us that did make it through the storm. We were still working throughout the downturn and now we're able to turn wells on and benefit much more than we would have had this price increase not happened. But you had so many shareholders of some of these big public companies that actually moved the needle, that want to see some returns. They've been sitting in these companies for years and it's been growth at any cost. And with the last administration, everyone was, "Hoo rah, let's go," and then you change the administration and it's like, "No, let's pull back." And a lot of these big companies have said, "Okay, well, we're going to listen to the administration a little bit." They're causing a few extra hurdles. And then we've also got our investors,