The Texas Railroad Commission, which will replace one of its three commissioners this year, has nothing to do with railroads. The 130-year-old regulatory body once worked with other countries to control the world’s oil markets. While it retains legal jurisdiction today over the shale boom that has seen record amounts of oil gush from West Texas, the commission has mostly ceded its enormous authority in recent decades and let oil companies self-regulate.
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Castañeda, who lives in Dallas and formerly worked as the lawyer for the oil and gas magnate T. Boone Pickens, has focused her campaign on the issue of natural gas flaring. The practice—of burning off unwanted natural gas at the site where it’s extracted—is happening more now than at any point since the 1950s, releasing enormous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide and responsible for a quarter of all human-caused warming since 2000.
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While drillers are forbidden from flaring after their first 10 days of operations, a report last year found that the sitting commissioners issued exemptions for drillers that allowed $750 million worth of natural gas to be burned off through flaring in a single year.
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