PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE The Task By Rikki Hrenko-Browning President, UPA have crop insurance like our partners and friends in agriculture. We aren’t assured a rate of return like a regulated utility. Whatever decisions oil and gas companies make, all the risk and all the reward fall squarely on their shoulders, and success or failure carries real capital consequences. That’s why we have to focus on making the best possible decisions, using the best available information at the time. Ours is a business built on prudent economics. How do we operate judiciously, efficiently and economically, no matter the conditions? How do we innovate to meet the needs of our many, many stakeholders? How do we continue to responsibly develop the products that supply our refineries, which, by extension, provide gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and thousands of products developed by petrochemicals we all rely on for our daily comforts? Our business is complex. Do the people we elect fully understand the nuances of our business and the breadth of implications their enacted policies will have on us? We don’t expect them to know every single aspect of our business; that would be unreasonable. Anyone who earns an elected office is going to The book “Chop Wood, Carry Water: How To Fall in Love With the Process of Becoming Great” by Joshua Medcalf is about a boy’s journey to achieve his lifelong goal of becoming a samurai warrior. When he arrives in Japan to pursue this dream, he is dismayed that his sensei instructs him to spend his morning — and many mornings after — chopping wood and carrying water to meet the community’s needs. “Chop Wood, Carry Water” reflects a Zen Buddhist work practice that emphasizes focusing on the task at hand and the present moment. It’s here that I think about the Uinta Basin. We can’t control the price of a globally traded commodity, nor can we control the global or national politics that influence industry activity writ large. On a local level, we cannot account for decisions made by our state elected leaders, although we work tirelessly to educate them about the unintended consequences and unseen impacts of those decisions. Whether they choose to listen or not is out of our hands. All we can control are the fundamentals of our business, and it’s worth noting that ours is an inherently risky endeavor. We don’t 6 UPDATE
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