Republican Jim Wright defeated Democrat Chrysta Castañeda for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates the oil and gas industry.
With nearly 88 percent of the statewide vote reported by early Wednesday morning, Wright, the owner of a group of oilfield services companies in South Texas, led Castañeda, a prominent Dallas oil and gas lawyer, by more than 1 million votes. Wright won more than 53 percent of the vote, Castañeda more than 43 percent, the Green and Libertarian candidates together just over 3 percent.
No Democrat has won a seat on the industry-friendly Railroad Commission since 1990.
Castañeda and her supporters hoped to break that losing streak, in part because Wright was a political unknown who’d never before sought elective office. He upset incumbent Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton in the March Republican primary, an outcome that Wright said surprised even him.
Sitton entered the GOP primary with $2 million in campaign cash, and the public support of the four most powerful officeholders in Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and the state’s two U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Wright had a famous Texas name and $12,600 in campaign contributions.
Castañeda’s chances, and her public profile, seemed to get a boost when, in the final days of the campaign, she received a $2.6 million donation from Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor and a deep-pockets champion of Democratic causes and candidates.
Castañeda made national headlines in 2016 as the lawyer for T. Boone Pickens in a West Texas lawsuit stemming from a dispute over the ownership of 160 oil wells. She won a $146 million jury verdict for Pickens and his oil company, Mesa Petroleum Partners. The defendants, Baytech LLP and Delaware Basin Resources LLC of Midland, later settled with Pickens for an undisclosed amount.
She campaigned on a promise to clamp down on “flaring,” the intentional burning of natural gas at the wellhead to save oil producers money. When oil is extracted, natural gas comes with it. Currently, that gas is worth less than it would cost to move it to market, so producers simply set it on fire instead, a practice Castañeda called wasteful and an environmental hazard. The three-member Railroad Commission has the legal authority to prohibit flaring, she said, but refused in case after case to do so.
Wright, who calls himself “a pro-life, Second Amendment conservative,” ran as a proud and reliable friend of the oil and gas industry. He pledged to do all he could as a commissioner to help the industry rebound from the tailspin it’s been in since the pandemic stalled demand for petroleum products and, together with overproduction by Russia and Saudi Arabia, drove prices for West Texas crude into the ground.
If elected, he said in a YouTube campaign video, “I will continue to stand up to the liberals, the bureaucrats, and keep Texas a world energy leader.”