Department of Interior Secretary selects Deborah Rogers to advisory committee

FORT WORTH, Texas (December 26, 2012) – Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has appointed 21 members to an advisory committee that will guide and oversee implementation of the United States Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (USEITI).

Included was Deborah Rogers of Fort Worth, founder of the Energy Policy Forum and one of the first in the U.S. to report inherent financial problems with shale gas production.

The committee will serve as the initial USEITI Multi-Stakeholder Group and includes representatives from federal and state government agencies, companies and public stakeholders. A full list of committee members can be found at the USEITI website: www.doi.gov/eiti.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative is a voluntary, global effort designed to increase transparency, strengthen the accountability of natural resource revenue reporting and build public trust for the governance of these activities. Participating countries publicly disclose revenues received by the government for oil, gas and mining development, while companies make corresponding disclosures, and both sets of data are reviewed and reconciled by a mutually agreed upon independent third party. Results are then released in a public report.

"This is a tremendous opportunity to address financial issues with respect to natural resource extraction in this country,” Rogers said. “I am very honored to have been chosen and look forward to serving."

Rogers’ career work includes investment banking in London and financial consulting for several Wall Street firms, including Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. In 2003, the entrepreneurial bug struck and she started Deborah’s Farmstead, an artisanal cheese-making operation, and quickly established the company as one of the premier artisanal dairies and cheese makers in the U.S.

During 2011, she founded Energy Policy Forum, a consultancy and educational forum dedicated to policy and financial issues regarding shale gas and renewable energy. (http://energypolicyforum.org/)

Rogers served on the Advisory Council for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 2008-2011. She is a Member of the Board of Earthworks/OGAP (Oil and Gas Accountability Project). She was appointed in 2011 by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to a task force reviewing placement of air monitors in the Barnett Shale region in light of air quality concerns brought about by the natural gas operations in North Texas.

In June of 2012, she was invited to speak in Rio de Janeiro at the International Society for Ecological Economics in conjunction with the United Nations Rio+20 world summit. In addition, she lectures on shale gas economics throughout the U.S. and abroad at universities, business venues and public forums and has appeared on MSNBC and NPR. She has also been featured in articles discussing the financial anomalies of shale gas in the New York Times (June, 2011) and Rolling Stone (March, 2012) and the Village Voice (September, 2012). In addition, she will appear in the upcoming documentary GasLand 2.