Mike Conaway: “I thank the gentleman from North Dakota, clearly, a State that is a major player in this oil and gas renaissance that…”

“I thank the gentleman from North Dakota, clearly, a State that is a major player in this oil and gas renaissance that has occurred over the last 5 years. I would also like to point out that the oil and gas business, per se, is an incredibly fertile ground for small business development. And my dad, I mentioned earlier, was a great example of this. There are lots of narrow-focused aspects of the service side of the business. We all think of the drilling rigs and the big investments there, but there are various aspects, whether it is hauling things or mud or whatever is the deal, where entrepreneurs, men and women who want to take a little risk, can put a little capital together, put some tools together, and begin servicing an aspect of the business that is there. So it is incredibly fertile in terms of setting up new businesses. I have got one group in Eastland, Texas, that, just as the renaissance was beginning to start, they thought it was a good idea to get into some aspect of the fracking business and, over a very short period of time, built that business into a multi-billion-dollar deal and sold it. So incredible wealth was created as a result of small businesses turning into a medium-sized business, turning into a big business, and then, ultimately, sold to another bigger business for an awful lot of money.…”