North Dakota Industrial Commission

and wanted to know if I was interested in making a career change.

So in October of 2009, I moved into a position working for the Industrial Commission and the Lignite Energy Council, a joint position, and have served in that until 2016. when I made a decision that, you know, all of us get to a point where it's time to allow the young guys to take over.

And luckily there was another mic ready and waiting to take that position and has moved forward with it very ably.

So it's been a, interesting journey and one I've enjoyed very much.

Does that count? I'm not changing my name to Mike.

I've been told that I don't have to.

My name's Jason Laum, current VP of Research for the Lignite Energy Council and Technical Advisor for the North Dakota Industrial Commission Lignite Research Program.

That is a mouthful.

Well, and to that point, to have this claim, as some people have in media and certainly on those that are in office, saying, well, the Aid Commission doesn't have anything to do with this industry.

Well, guess what? You're one of three on the Industrial Commission.

And it wasn't all that long ago, Vern, that they approved $500 million to go to a natural gas pipeline, that if you look at that route and you look where these data centers are being proposed, you put those maps over each other and they line up pretty dang good.

Right.

There are a few things that can be controlled, trade, that farm bill.

Those are federal issues, but when it comes to the state, you're the ag commissioner.

You're on the industrial commission.

You've got all these opportunities.

You know,

they got the NDIC that's keeping an eye on them, but I think the only thing the NDIC is keeping an eye

on is

what oil companies are hiring and when they're going to get hired to go on a board and have a very lucrative job down the road by not causing any trouble.

We have an organization in the state of North Dakota called the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

And then you also have the North Dakota Industrial Commission and they work alongside, you know, all the independent companies and also the EERC.

And I'm not going to remember the name of that slogan, but the EERC is basically a research council here in the state of North Dakota.

And so those groups will work together and independently to kind of figure out what that crack the code means for enhanced oil recovery.

And so it's an ongoing evaluation.

It's something that we look at quarterly here.

We go through all of our assets, all of our producing wells, and we compare it to the North Dakota Industrial Commission website.

We make sure that the status that we are showing in our software agrees to the status that the state is showing.