From an April 15 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

In the past two years, the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association lost 40 percent of its members.

The first to go were the oil and gas service firms, said Lou D’Amico, president and executive director of the Wexford-based trade group. In a down cycle, they are usually the quickest to falter, Mr. D’Amico said.

“When we catch a cold, they get pneumonia,” he said.

But the whole industry is sick, Mr. D’Amico said at PIOGA’s spring meeting at the Rivers Casino on the North Shore last week — punnily titled “Betting on Our Industry.”

The cure he’s betting on lies with the burner tip — the end user.

Where PIOGA once sought to be a leading voice for oil and gas companies, the organization’s new mission statement gives equal weight to businesses that run their facilities on natural gas, fill up their tanks with it or transport it to other users.

“The producing industry is not on an island by itself,” Mr. D’Amico said. “We have other folks out there that have similar interests as us, similar problems — burner tip folks. These folks are very much part of what we do, and we need to get more involved with them.”

Such businesses are also a more stable membership base than the kinds of companies that first ballooned PIOGA’s books during the shale boom six years ago and then deflated it when commodity prices tanked.

At the casino last week, Mr. D’Amico bemoaned the headwinds facing oil and gas producers, reaching for the conspiratorial and grandiose. “There are more people involved in trying to shut down what we do than there are people trying to help us,” he said.

He called global warming “an excuse” and said it’s impossible to determine what might be causing it.

Environmental regulations, he said, are more oppressive than ever.

Off the podium, Mr. D’Amico and the organization’s board of directors hava chosen to concentrate on the marketplace’s role in sinking the profits of oil and gas companies — especially small, conventional producers that have been the foundation of PIOGA for decades.

The trade group hired Joyce Turkaly as director of natural gas development and tasked her with looking beyond the wellhead to find a home for the gas that Pennsylvania producers have to sell.

That journey has involved detours into how electric markets incorporate natural gas power generation, an exploration of natural gas vehicles and infrastructure, and a lot of matchmaking.

Recently, Ms. Turkaly has been focusing her efforts on state and county economic development teams, helping them understand how to attract large industrial consumers from an energy supply perspective.

“I used to sell gas to industrials during my career,” she said. “I understand industrial customers. I understand what they’re looking for when it comes to siting and ease of development.”

Long before shale gas turned commodity prices upside down, energy costs would account for up to 80 percent of an industrial facility’s operating budget, Ms. Turkaly said.

“That has flipped, of course, given recent economics,” she said, but “I don’t think it’s time for the industrials to get sleepy about this.”

Ms. Turkaly and Mr. D’Amico caution the new direction will take time to yield measurable results, both in the organization’s membership and in boosting the market for natural gas.

The effort is loosely modeled on a national organization, the American Natural Gas Alliance, which was working to expand markets for natural gas when it merged into the American Petroleum Institute, another Washington, D.C.-based trade group which represents producers.

But Mr. D’Amico likes to note that PIOGA is the only state association reaching out to end users today.

“Our survival depends on the burner tips,” he said.