Who Regulates Drilling
Every producing state has someone who decides where a well may be drilled and when it must be plugged. In almost every state, you do not choose that person.
The body that sets your electricity rate is usually a different body from the one that permits oil and gas wells — different members, different law, often a different department. Utility Regulators 101 covers the first. This page covers the second, and the striking thing about it is how rarely a voter is involved.
01 Who Picks Them
Across the states where we can name the regulator, there are four different answers, and only one of them involves an election.
In the two states where you do vote for it, you are voting for your utility regulator at the same time. Texas elects the Railroad Commission and Oklahoma elects the Corporation Commission — and each of those bodies regulates oil and gas and utilities. There is no separate drilling regulator on the ballot anywhere in the country. Kansas has the same arrangement without the election: its Corporation Commission does both jobs and is appointed.
Everywhere else the job is filled by appointment — or by nobody's choice at all, which is the category most people do not expect.
02 The Seats Nobody Runs For
On many of these boards, some seats are held ex officio: the holder gets the seat automatically because they hold some other job. They did not apply for it, nobody appointed them to it, and they will lose it the day they leave the other post.
The entire commission is three people who were elected to something else. The North Dakota Industrial Commission consists of the Governor, the Attorney General and the Agriculture Commissioner. The Governor chairs it, and a quorum is the Governor plus one other member.
So North Dakotans do elect their oil and gas regulators — but never as oil and gas regulators. The office appears on no ballot. A voter choosing an Agriculture Commissioner is also choosing one third of the body that governs the Bakken, and nothing on the ballot says so.
North Dakota is the pure case; the mixed ones are more common. Wyoming's five-member commission seats the Governor, the Director of State Lands and the State Geologist alongside two appointees. Arizona's six-member commission reserves one seat for the State Land Commissioner. Colorado's board has seven members but only five votes, because its two ex-officio members — a department director and the state's top air-quality official — sit without a vote.
New Mexico goes one step further: its seats are held by stand-ins. The Oil Conservation Commission is three members by statute — the Director of the Oil Conservation Division, a designee of the Commissioner of Public Lands, and a designee of the Secretary of Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources. The Commissioner of Public Lands is an elected statewide official in New Mexico, but does not sit personally. The seat belongs to whoever is sent.
03 The Boards
Where a state has a real board rather than a division inside a department, the seats usually are not interchangeable. Most carry a statutory qualification, so a vacancy has to be filled by someone with the matching credential.
| State | Body | Seats | How seats are filled |
|---|
Alaska's three seats are petroleum geology, petroleum engineering and a public member. Colorado's five voting seats are oil and gas experience, public health, land use, wildlife and general expertise. Montana's seven reserve three for the industry and two for landowners in producing counties — one who owns the mineral rights beneath their land and one who does not, a distinction that exists because those two people want opposite things.
Nine commissioners, and the reason is brine. Arkansas has the largest oil and gas board in this survey: nine members, each appointed by the Governor to a staggered six-year term, with no limit on how many terms one person may serve.
Its remit is wider than its neighbours'. Alongside oil and natural gas it regulates brine — including the Class V injection wells that dispose of spent fluid after bromine extraction. South Arkansas sits on one of the world's richest bromine formations, and the same body that permits a gas well also governs that industry.
04 What This Page Does Not Cover
Many states regulate oil and gas through a division inside a department — a bureau under a Department of Natural Resources or an environmental agency, run by a director rather than a board. Those are real regulators, but they have no members, no seats and no appointments to track, so they are outside this page.
That is also why the map above shows fewer states than produce oil. The question here is narrow: is there an identifiable group of people holding seats, and how did they get them? Where the answer is “one civil servant reporting to a department head”, there is nothing to put on a ballot and nothing to show.