A new messenger makes her mark at COGA

Tisha Conoly Schuller has plenty of time to reflect on her hour-long commute from her log cabin in Gold Hill to her office in Denver. As the president and CEO of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, she has plenty upon which to reflect.

Conoly Schuller is three-plus months into her third year leading COGA, and despite the challenges of the job, her sense of humor remains intact. When asked whether she considers her tenure a success so far, she said, “If public concern over fracking is any reflection, I should be immediately replaced!”

Fortunately for Conoly Schuller, her 40-member board of directors disagrees with her.

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“Tisha is a whirlwind of energy,´ said COGA board chair Scott Moore, vice president of marketing at Anadarko Petroleum Corp. “She has provided a much-needed different face of the industry. She has a strong sense of connection with the environmental community and finds ways to identify a common ground between our values and theirs.”

Moore’s optimism aside, the contention around shale gas mining keeps Conoly Schuller awake at night. She’s convinced solutions can be found to improve the dialogue about the controversial energy extraction process that has so divided industry and communities across the nation. While it’s hardly her only challenge — moratoria on new drilling permits continue to pile up across Colorado — it’s the hot button upon which she was hired to pour cold water.

“All the misinformation about the (shale gas) industry that is out there — it’s hard to counter that with science-based facts,” she said. “That’s a long-term process. On the other hand, the industry has not connected well with public emotion about the issue. Part of my style is to cultivate an empathy and understanding with the opposition. We also are parents and users of forests. (She has two children who live with her in that cabin in Gold Hill.) A lot of my job is connecting those things.”

Conoly Schuller was attempting to explain this to shale gas industry executives in September when she inadvertently stirred things up again. As the keynote speaker at a conference entitled Enhancing Shale Oil & Gas Development Strategies, she exhorted those in the audience to adopt a more open, more realistic dialogue with the “nuts” who opposed fracking.

Her message was that these were not nuts, but in fact the vast majority of citizens in communities impacted by fracking. But her words got picked up by fracking foes who used them to further excoriate the industry for its alleged head-in-the-sand attitude toward concerns raised about the extraction method.

“What I was trying to explain was that these are not concerns of the fringe,” she said. “A mainstream population is concerned with this, not just a fringe. The challenge is we have too many independent echo chambers. We reinforce our own vision of reality. We know the drilling can be done safely. So it’s easy to dismiss someone’s concerns. We need to acknowledge the emotion but engage at a level of science and fact.”

What’s frustrating to Conoly Schuller is that she comes from the environmental side of the coin and believes that she has thoroughly reviewed the science behind fracking and knows that it can be done safely.

“The misinformation is much more prevalent than the fact-based information,” she said. “It’s heart-breaking for me that the technology that allows us to get so much energy for so little environmental degradation is being held back. We’ll continue and ultimately the facts will prevail. It will take years for the conversation to evolve, but we will prevail. In the end, this is responsible energy development.”

Of course, her critics would beg to differ. But she has been slowly, surely engaging them in dialogue, said Anadarko’s Moore. And the COGA board has confidence in her ability to change the nature of the oil and gas exploration conversation in Colorado. “If anyone can do this, it’s Tisha,” Moore said. “She is not what you expect from the president of a trade association when she walks into the room.”

Conoly Schuller grew up in a working class neighborhood in Tucson, Ariz. She got early lessons in self-reinvention. Her mom got a mid-life doctorate in psychology, and her stepdad, a Baptist minister, went to medical school and became a physician in his mid-50s. Conoly Schuller received a near full-ride to Stanford University (“I was sure it was a mistake but I wasn’t gonna tell them that”) where she distinctly heard a career in environmental sciences calling her name.

She landed a job in the San Francisco Bay Area out of school, and within a few years found herself transferred to Boulder to open an office for an environmental consulting firm.

“I was 25, had a dog and a pickup truck and there I was in Boulder. I was completely unprepared for the job, but that didn’t faze me. It was a blessing and I am here to stay,” she said.

Her resume zig-zags wildly from consulting firm to consulting firm. She opened new offices, carved out new turf, handled a turnaround situation (“I discovered that’s what I really like to do”) and generally built a reputation as an expert in oil and gas project management.

Then a beleaguered COGA came calling.

“When I took the COGA job it was such a stretch. It was not like anything I had ever trained to do. It involved lots of media and politics, all pretty much new to me,” she said. “I am an environmentalist and I felt like the public conversation didn’t reflect what I knew about the industry. I think I can be a translator.”

She’s already scored some impressive victories in her role as association leader.

She helped formulate, with the governor’s office, a rulemaking process for disclosure on hydraulic fracturing.

She has spearheaded a highly successful, statewide voluntary baseline water sampling program that is designed to measure water quality before and after drilling.

And recently, in her ongoing campaign to turn the industry’s communications strategy around, she created a new community outreach position.

Sarah Landry, whom Conoly Schuller hired for the job, had already visited every Colorado community with oil and gas operations in her first month on the job. “She’s definitely high energy,” Conoly Schuller said.

Can the industry truly change the dialogue around fracturing in Colorado?

Conoly Schuller thinks so, but cautions that it could take several years.

She’s already thinking ahead to new challenges: she’d love to run her own oil and gas company, and sees that happening in the next five years — once she gets that fracking fracas resolved.