August promises to be a hugely significant month for this industry, in the Gulf of Mexico and on Capitol Hill. Trans­ocean and an Aggie-led team of Boots & Coots were close to tapping into the Macondo well to permanently stop it. You could hear a sigh of relief all over Houston the afternoon that BP announced it had stopped the flow of oil from the well for the first time, at least temporarily, while testing continued.

Risk informs the oil and gas industry, and indeed, is part of most any worthwhile endeavor. True, the degree varies, but in the end risk cannot be overstated. Yet at the same time, we don’t need to cower under the sheets, either.

Operators completed some 10,358 oil and gas wells and dry holes in the second quarter of 2010, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Who wants to bet how many of those wells came within an inch of having a blowout or other explosion; or of causing water, land or air pollution, or injuring people?

It’s a remarkably safe track record that the public never sees.

Oddly, the public avoids risk in real life, yet it pays to watch it on screen and in sports arenas. We don’t see the terrorist plots that have been foiled. We hardly notice that from time to time, there are near-misses in the air as some 80,000 commercial flights crisscross these 50 states every day.

Oil and gas operators are paid by their investors to seek risk, in order to gain reward. Indeed, some operators thrive on it. It takes a certain kind of person to okay a $100-million authorization for expenditure to drill in 8,000 feet of water. It takes a certain mindset to roll the dice on the tenth well out in some god-forsaken prairie when the first nine were dry holes and investors look at you like you’re crazy.

Thanks to BP’s Macondo, the nature of risk is changing. In a recent report, service analyst Robert Mackenzie of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey notes a power shift is taking place offshore since the blowout.

“We have learned that the service companies have become far more assertive in their relationships with their customers, particularly offshore. We have heard of several instances where an operator attempted to change a large service company’s cementing recommendations for deepwater wells.

“Past practice would have been to come to a consensus procedure, but now we are hearing of service-company insistence on following their optimized designs, even to the point of informing the operator that deviation from these procedures will shift any and all liability to the operator. This change in the relationship should lead to higher pricing and margins for the service companies over time.”

One risk we cannot seem to escape is that of a congressional subcommittee in some back room forging new regulations on what a blowout preventer should look like.

Finally, by the time you read this, the U.S. Senate will be marking up yet another version of an energy bill; this time, a compendium that draws on proposals from numerous prior drafts. The liberal Center for American Progress has suggested that a final bill ought to include the following items, collected from various existing bills that subcommittees have already approved:

Oil spill response program, clean energy and job creation, reduce oil use, clean energy infrastructure (more power grids), clean energy finance (launch new technologies via a “green bank”), renewable energy (establish a renewable electricity standard of 15% by 2020; 25% by 2025), clean manufacturing and job training, clean energy tax provisions (extend existing tax incentives; close loopholes that benefit big oil companies), limit pollution from electric utilities, support reductions for carbon pollution from at least one of the biggest sources—such as power plants; return two-thirds of revenue from pollution allowances to ratepayers; invest the rest in clean energy technologies.

That’s quite a shopping list.

Remember the Emmy-winning cop drama, “Hill Street Blues”? At the end of each morning briefing in the squad room, Sergeant Phil Esterhaus sent the assembled cops into the field with this: “Let’s be careful out there.”

We hope to see you at our 9th annual A&D Strategies and Opportunities Conference in Dallas on September 2. Keynote speakers include Bank of America Merrill Lynch vice chairman Tom Petrie on the commodity outlook, KKR & Co.’s John Bookout III on shale investing, and Atlas Energy CEO Rich Weber on his billion-dollar JV with India’s Reliance Industries in the Marcellus shale. Go to adstrategiesconference.com for more information.

And right behind that, on October 5, join us in San Antonio for DUG Eagle Ford, followed by DUG East in Pittsburgh on November 3 and 4.