Activist-turned-oil exec faces down protests

Tisha Schuller is the face of the oil and gas industry in Colorado, the centre of an intensive fight with protesters.

Trying to get opposing factions to meet in the middle is not easy, but a little bit of kindness helps.

One-time environmental activist Tisha Schuller is the face of the oil and gas industry in Colorado, the centre of an intensive fight with protesters and says the road to winning the public over is a long and "boring" one.

She also says that paid proponents like her are the least likely to be successful in a hearts and minds campaign - people are more likely to trust those who do the work in oil fields, especially geologists.

"It's all the people you pay to get your message out there," Schuller told delegates at the Advantage New Zealand Petroleum Summit.

"Everyone loves to love a geologist - you are the most reliable source of information." Schuller, the outgoing head of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association who has been credited with taking some of the heat out of the argument there, talked frankly about how her organisation deals with opponents.

There's still a lot of anger though. Some routinely hiss at her as she passes them on protest lines and she has been called a "baby killer".

She acknowledges that her conversion from environmental activist to the head of the state's biggest O&G industry trade group was especially inflammatory for opponents.

Her staff went out of their way to make sure protesters on the street had sunscreen, water and energy bars.

"We try to be kind - we don't want to energise a protest and make it a story."

Many professional activists were able to mobilise quickly and one of her 12 staff spent much of their time monitoring activist websites. When protests loom, the association activates third parties - friendly business groups or trade organisations not directly connected to oil and gas - and asks them to advocate on behalf of the industry.

They are not paid for this otherwise it would not be authentic, Schuller said.

Extreme activists who threaten industry workers or damage property weren't likely to be talked around, she said.

"Often we try to let the most militant be the face [of protest]. For us we're not trying to win their hearts and minds - we're wanting the 80 per cent in the middle."

She said the protesters outside the conference at Auckland's SkyCity were "sweet" by comparison.

Colorado has a 150-year history of drilling and about 50,000 wells, up from 30,000 a decade ago as fracking boomed, despite lengthy legal battles. Schuller said there were about 40,000 employees directly in the oil and gas industry, and 100,000 in related jobs.

Outside the Auckland conference she said the debate over drilling had been polarised, to the detriment of both sides.

"Drill baby drill is one caricature and ban fracking is the other. Those are lazy points of view that don't win anyone new over to their side," she said.

All the interesting work happened when opponents met in the middle and this often involved hours of meetings that were not "particularly sexy or newsworthy", she said.

"This has to be done. The expectations are high of us and we can meet them.

"We can, and should, be motivated to engage, we spend a lot of time being defensive and if we move the conversation to the middle it can be productive."

Schuller said the industry was incredibly technically innovative but needed to be equally innovative with community engagement.

Laws covering the industry were also constantly evolving.

"This is a continous evolution of how the industry engages and how the public react. This idea of regulatory stability is a thing of the past. There are higher expectations within communities who will always want to be in dialogue with us."

Facts were difficult to share with those who didn't want to hear them, she said, and what the industry strived for most was trust. Anyone in the oil and gas industry could be an ambassador.

Schuller did a degree in earth systems and participated in rallies and protests, and was on the board of an environmental activist group that sued oil and gas companies.

Her conversion to the oil industry came after she did some work on consenting a wind farm that ended up dominating the landscape and was "visually disturbing".

"It created a fair bit of controversy when I took this job."

She lives in a log cabin in the mountains near Boulder and considers herself an environmentalist.

"My heart is about natural places and natural beauty and that's true of a lot of people who work in oil and gas."