John Bell criticizes government for buying high-dollar oil

Odessa American By Bob Campbell

When it comes to buying oil, Kermit Republican John Bell says the federal government won’t win any “smart shopper” awards.

“The U.S. government has been the dumbest buyer of oil of anybody,” he said. “It’s a panic buyer. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is full of $30 and $40 a barrel oil.”

Bell, 50, is one of 17 candidates in the May 3 open ballot congressional election.

He’s an independent oil producer who led marches on the Capitol in Austin four years ago to protest his industry’s depressed condition.

Bell said the government has rarely taken advantage of low prices to stock its billion-barrel reserves on the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana.

“The SPR needs to be absolutely full,” he said, noting that each reserve currently has only about 700,000 barrels. “When Venezuela shut off, we should have backed out of the market.”

Nicknamed “Give ’em Hell Bell” by Austin media, the candidate’s higher education was “a semester or two” at New Mexico State University in Alamogordo after graduating from Weed High School near Cloudcroft.

But he points to his success in the oil business, lifelong voracious reading and his tenure as president of the Kermit School Board to argue he is more qualified than other candidates.

Bell owns nine oil wells, has investments in others and often works as a drilling workover and completions consultant. He has been involved in farming and ranching since his youth. His father, Dalton, now retired in Artesia, owned two farms and a ranch near Hobbs, Artesia and Cloudcroft that Bell worked on.

After high school, he spent eight summers as a “helitack” foreman, flying by helicopter to fight fires for the U.S. Forest Service. He and his wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, have six children. He wears a heart pacemaker.

“My experience and the things I have done more than compensated,” Bell said, addressing his lack of a college education. “I know more about energy and education than any candidate running, and I know agriculture as well as any candidate.”

Referring to one of his rivals, Republican state Rep. Carl Isett of Lubbock, he said. “Carl doesn’t understand public school education because all six of his kids were homeschooled.

“These issues of my campaign — energy, education, water and agriculture — are my life. I’m totally committed and involved in these things.”

Bell took umbrage at candidate Dr. Richard Bartlett’s advocacy of tapping the Capitan Reef Aquifer under Ward and Winkler counties to help solve area water shortages at a Monday night candidates’ forum at UTPB.

“I know where Dr. Bartlett got that,” Bell said, meaning he was first with the idea.

He said Capitan Reef water, already being used at Fort Stockton through reverse osmosis to remove dissolved solids, would have to be processed, but that it’s plentiful enough to justify the expense. “There was a natural lake west of Wink until the Railroad Commission forced them to put the water back in the ground in the 1960s,” Bell said.