Oil Drilling Quotes

The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well.

Alaska is much larger than France and Germany—combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of “spoiling” Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport.

Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must!

...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

Here at the end of the world, with the climate crisis bearing down like Godzilla over downtown Tokyo, U.S. taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas drilling are now almost literally insane.

He remembers what the spiritual visionary, Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota said – man's scratching of the earth causes diseases like cancer. He meant the mining and drilling for coal, gas, oil, uranium. The scratching brings up the things deep in the earth that should have stayed down there.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?' B.D. scratched under her Admiral's hat. 'What'd you think gas was, girl? 'Course there's all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you're wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it's wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.' Her otter's paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. 'It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean's face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go.

When we weren’t dancing or fucking, we were marching. Marching for the Sandinistas and against Nicaraguan strongman Somoza. Marching for the Filipino people and against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Marching in solidarity with the people of Chile and against the murderous General Pinochet. Marching against nuclear power and offshore oil drilling. Marching for equal pay for women in the US and against apartheid in South Africa.

The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be -- through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business.

Enjoying the view?” I asked, finally, tired of his eyes drilling into the side of my head. “Enjoying isn’t the right word,” he returned, swirling his amaretto. “It’s more a morbid fascination with your spiral into self-destruction.

Scratch me and you get grief. It will well up surreptitiously and slip away down any declivity, perhaps undermining the foundations but keeping a low profile and trying not to inconvenience anybody. Scratch my sister at your peril however, because you’ll get rage, a geyser of it, like hitting oil after drilling dry, hot rock for months and it suddenly, shockingly, plumes up into the sky, black and viscous, coating everything as it falls to earth. Take care when you scratch.

Geez, rub your ass against the man once and all of a sudden, he thinks he has claim over it. Well, I did shove my tongue down his throat like I was drilling for oil…but still.

In which state was the first successful oil well drilled in 1859? The Drake Well in Titusville, Pennsylvania was the first successful oil well drilled for the sole purpose of finding oil.

Iraq is the last great frontier in the Middle East … . In Iraq, 80 per cent of the oil wells ever drilled have been discoveries. —David Horgan, chief executive of the Irish oil company Petrel, January 20072

In the morning I want to see if my car will start.” He shook his head. “It won’t. All the oil ran out through a tiny hole in the oil pan. The engine overheated and the pistons froze up. Your car’s fucked.” “Shit. None of my dashboard lights came on.” “No? Oh, that’s probably because I disabled them.” “What?” “Yeah, I removed a few fuses, right after I drilled that tiny little hole in the pan.” She stared at him for a long moment as her thoughts spun in utter turmoil. “You vandalized my car?

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare’s startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

Anyone who studies the history of American commerce or warfare should be interested in Burning Springs, nicknamed "Oiltown." This was the site of the first oil well in West Virginia, drilled in 1860, just one year after the nation's first well was opened in Pennsylvania.

The team next needed a closer look at the reactor itself, so they brought in oil industry engineers to drill through the reactor’s reinforced-concrete containment structure. They finally broke through in the summer of 1988 after 18 months of drilling in harsh conditions.

Mexican Loneliness" And I am an unhappy stranger grooking in the streets of Mexico- My friends have died on me, my lovers disappeared, my whores banned, my bed rocked and heaved by earthquake - and no holy weed to get high by candlelight and dream - only fumes of buses, dust storms, and maids peeking at me thru a hole in the door secretly drilled to watch masturbators fuck pillows - I am the Gargoyle of Our Lady dreaming in space gray mist dreams -- My face is pointed towards Napoleon ------ I have no form ------ My address book is full of RIP's I have no value in the void, at home without honor, - My only friend is an old fag without a typewriter Who, if he's my friend, I'll be buggered. I have some mayonnaise left, a whole unwanted bottle of oil, peasants washing my sky light, a nut clearing his throat in the bathroom next to mine a hundred times a day sharing my common ceiling - If I get drunk I get thirsty - if I walk my foot breaks down - if I smile my mask's a farce - if I cry I'm just a child - - if I remember I'm a liar - if I write the writing's done - - if I die the dying's over - - if I live the dying's just begun - - if I wait the waiting's longer - if I go the going's gone if I sleep the bliss is heavy the bliss is heavy on my lids - if I go to cheap movies the bedbugs get me - Expensive movies I can't afford - if I do nothing nothing does

On the same day, oil drilling equipment was set-up on the grounds and prepped to begin injecting liquid nitrogen into the earth beneath the foundations, but the requested nitrogen had been delayed by over 24 hours. Unsatisfied with the delay, the Deputy Chairman of the USSR’s Council of Ministers, Ivan Silayev, telephoned Bryukhanov and told him, “Find the nitrogen or you’ll be shot.208” He found it: the frightened tanker drivers were refusing to approach the area, but some military persuasion soon had them moving again, and the nitrogen began pumping before dawn.

Until the first petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil *was* oil. In Leviathan, a fine history of whaling, Eric Jay Dolin enumerates whale Phil's manifold applications: 'It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution.' In fact, its use as a lubricant impervious to extremes in temperature persisted well into the space age -- NASA lubed its moon landers and other remotely operated vehicles with sperm whale oil until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986.

But that, as they say, was none of my business. OPEC would go on drilling for oil, regardless of anyone’s opinion, conglomerates would make electricity and gasoline from that oil, people would be running around town late at night using up that gasoline. At the moment, however, I had my own problems to deal with.

to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face;

There was at least one exception to this description of the [Energy Task Force] papers as uninteresting. One document later obtained by Judicial Watch showed that Cheney's energy task force was studying Iraqi oil fields, and the companies that had drilling rights on them, as early as March 2001, two years before the invasion of Iraq.

As we use our last reserves of petroleum and pollute our world drilling for oil in areas where an “accident” can quickly become an enormous ecological disaster; as our air becomes more and more polluted and unhealthy; as food, housing, energy, transportation, and clothing become less and less affordable; what can save the Earth and civilization? Hemp can!

couldn’t they join a good fight? The coastal land of Louisiana had long been slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The state’s coast provides 40 percent of the nation’s wetlands, and its commercial fisheries provide a quarter to a third of the nation’s seafood. Experts agree that a major cause of the land’s subsidence is the extraction of oil and saltwater intrusion. Over the years, oil companies have dredged hundreds of canals and laid down pipeline through which oil drilled in the Gulf has been piped inland. Saltwater seeps in along the canals, killing grasses that once provided protection against Louisiana’s frequent tropical storms. Since 1930, the state had already lost an area equal to the size of Delaware—an average football field every hour.

So this summer, this first summer when he was allowed to have “visitation rights” with his father, with the divorce only one month old, Brian was heading north. His father was a mechanical engineer who had designed or invented a new drill bit for oil drilling, a self-cleaning, self-sharpening bit. He was working in the oil fields of Canada, up on the tree line where the tundra started and the forests ended. Brian was riding up from New York with some drilling equipment—it was lashed down in the rear of the plane next to a fabric bag the pilot had called a survival pack, which had emergency supplies in case they had to make an emergency landing—that had to be specially made in the city, riding in the bushplane with the pilot named Jim or Jake or something who had turned out to be an all right guy, letting him fly and all.

The really crazy thing was that it was Oryx leading the pack, not bigger companies like Exxon, Mobil, and Amoco. Those companies had been focused on finding huge pools of oil abroad, not on improving drilling methods and squeezing out more from fields in the United States. Those “major” oil companies had been convinced that “elephant” fields in the United States were extinct. Now some were trying to figure out how to get involved in the Austin Chalk region.

I recognized the emphasis on “grit” as a final throwing up of hands. Kids too young to speak would be held responsible for their own problems. It didn’t matter how they were wronged, or how preventable the harm; their job was to contain the damage, making the blast zone smaller by absorbing all the impact. When flagrant affronts drew the ire of society—like migrant children separated from their families and detained in tent cities, oil fields, and a converted Walmart—I found myself numb. Maybe it’s for the better, I thought. Maybe the adversity will make them stronger. The doctrine of “anything bad can be alchemized into something good” had been so drilled into me that it seemed to apply even in this extreme situation. I was horrified by the logic I’d internalized. The whole song and dance of resilience chipped away at my humanity. It required a profound lack of empathy. It erased any pain, no matter how great, as long as it resulted in productivity.

And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings;

Rockefeller immediately put those insights to use. At twenty-five, a group of investors offered to invest approximately $500,000 at his direction if he could find the right oil wells in which to deploy the money. Grateful for the opportunity, Rockefeller set out to tour the nearby oil fields. A few days later, he shocked his backers by returning to Cleveland empty-handed, not having spent or invested a dollar of the funds. The opportunity didn’t feel right to him at the time, no matter how excited the rest of the market was—so he refunded the money and stayed away from drilling. It

The Department of Justice had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue. In 1924, after a congressional committee revealed that the oil baron Harry Sinclair had bribed the secretary of the interior Albert Fall to drill in the Teapot Dome federal petroleum reserve—the name that would forever be associated with the scandal—the ensuing investigation lay bare just how rotten the system of justice was in the United States. When Congress began looking into the Justice Department, Burns and the attorney general used all their power, all the tools of law enforcement, to thwart the inquiry and obstruct justice.

Only on how we are becoming more and more commercial with each project.  Corporations are driving it all with their friends in Washington beating their ‘in the interest of national security’ drums which means that anything connected to energy these days, especially the black liquid kind, is considered national security.  Most of our projects in the last few years have been soil and drilling samples thinly disguised as marine research which really means looking for new oil reserves for the conglomerates.”  He leaned back in his chair unable to hide his irritation.  “I’ll tell you this, corporations have become the puppet masters behind the government.

I heard a right-wing radio show host two weeks ago talking about how the battle against environmentalists is winnable. He was saying the right wing had almost won the war. I heard this WHILE I was driving in Ohio on a main highway that was six inches above the flood waters. I can't imagine your average Ohio Republican voter is standing up to his waist in his flooded house thinking, “Goddamn straight! We've almost won the war against environmentalists! Time for a celebration!” talk about out fo touch with voters' concerns! You think they give a shit about whether there's a group oof people whoo think wind and solar power would help the world? No! Their number one concern is finding the front half of their house that rumor-has-it is a mile away on top of a Pizzeria Uno. Their main concern is not defending a billionaire's right to drill for oil in the last remaining polar bear's living room. Their main concern is finding something too weigh down their 2-year-old Corgi so he doesn't shoot off into the twister clouds like the last one did.

By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we don't already know. the battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. it wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, of for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. it wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crises is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. it wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending unlike Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands . it wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. it wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. it wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster,

if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries. Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive. The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases. Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well, China’s coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade—and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades. The prediction of global peak oil is fraught with

A strong argument can be made that Democrats are actually the greater evil, not the lesser one. Black Agenda Report (which provides “news, information and analysis from the black left”) uses the phrase “the more effective evil” to describe Barack Obama. While their analysis has focused on non-environmental issues, it holds true for Obama’s environmental record as well. Obama appears to be much more effective at advancing anti-environmental policies and programs than Republicans would be. One of the main reasons for this is Demophilia. If Mitt Romney had expanded offshore and onshore oil drilling, promoted nuclear power and fracking, attacked EPA rules, and pushed through trade agreements written by private corporations there would have been huge protests. Yet Obama does all these things with impunity while environmental organizations barely object. Demophilia enables the Democratic Party to get away with it, virtually unchallenged. Regardless

TOOLBOX   B - Bulbs, Batteries. D - Duct tape, Drills. E - Electrical tester. F - Fuses, Fan belt (spare). G - Glues (super, fabric, threadlock, multipurpose) H - Hammers. J - Jacks, Jumper leads. K - Knives (box and pocket). L - Level (spirit). M - Marker pen, Mallet. O - Oils (Engine and lubricating) P

Mother Nature is challenging enough, let's keep oil drilling out of the picture.

LYING WARS The war in Iraq grew out of the need to correct an error made by Geography when she put the West’s oil under the East’s sand. But no war is honest enough to confess: “I kill to steal.” “The devil’s shit,” as oil is called by its victims, has caused many wars and will certainly cause many more. In Sudan, for instance, a huge number of people lost their lives between the final years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, in an oil war that disguised itself as an ethnic and religious conflict. Derricks and drills, pipes and pipelines sprouted as if by magic in villages turned to ashes and in fields of ruined crops. In the Darfur region, where the butchery continues, the people, all Muslim, began to hate each other when they discovered there might be oil under their feet. The killing in the hills of Rwanda also claimed to be an ethnic and religious war, even though killers and killed were all Catholics. Hatred, a colonial legacy, stemmed from the time when Belgium decreed that those who raised cattle were Tutsis and those who grew crops were Hutus, and that the Tutsi minority ought to dominate the Hutu majority. In recent years, another multitude lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the service of foreign companies fighting over coltan. That rare mineral is an essential ingredient in cell phones, computers, microchips, and batteries, all of which are staples of the mass media. The media, however, forgot to mention coltan in their scant coverage of the war.

Daniel and the Pelican As I drove home from work one afternoon, the cars ahead of me were swerving to miss something not often seen in the middle of a six-lane highway: a great big pelican. After an eighteen-wheeler nearly ran him over, it was clear the pelican wasn’t planning to move any time soon. And if he didn’t, the remainder of his life could be clocked with an egg timer. I parked my car and slowly approached him. The bird wasn’t the least bit afraid of me, and the drivers who honked their horns and yelled at us as they sped by didn’t impress him either. Stomping my feet, I waved my arms and shouted to get him into the lake next to the road, all the while trying to direct traffic. “C’mon beat it, Big Guy, before you get hurt!” After a brief pause, he cooperatively waddled to the curb and slid down to the water’s edge. Problem solved. Or so I thought. The minute I walked away he was back on the road, resulting in another round of honking, squealing tires and smoking brakes. So I tried again. “Shoo, for crying out loud!” The bird blinked, first one eye then the other, and with a little sigh placated me by returning to the lake. Of course when I started for my car it was instant replay. After two more unsuccessful attempts, I was at my wits’ end. Cell phones were practically non-existent back then, and the nearest pay phone was about a mile away. I wasn’t about to abandon the hapless creature and run for help. He probably wouldn’t be alive when I returned. So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle. Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out. “Would you like a hand?” I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod. He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real. The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.” “I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered. Oh my goodness. “Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech. “Yes, every now and then.” In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary.

Daniel and the Pelican So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle. Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out. “Would you like a hand?” I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod. He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real. The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.” “I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered. Oh my goodness. “Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech. “Yes, every now and then.” In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary. As I watched Daniel prepare for his passenger, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew him from somewhere. “Have we ever met before?” I asked. “No I don’t think so,” was his reply, smiling again with warmth that would melt glaciers. I held my breath as the man crept toward the pelican. Their eyes met, and the bird meekly allowed Daniel to drape a towel over his face and place him in the cage. There was no struggle, no flapping wings and not one peep of protest--just calm. “Yes!” I shrieked with excitement when the door was latched. What had seemed a no-win situation was no longer hopeless. The pelican was finally safe. Before they drove away, I thanked my fellow rescuer for his help. “It was my pleasure, Michelle.” And he was gone. Wait a minute. How did he know my name? We didn’t introduce ourselves. I only knew his name because of his shirt. Later when I called the Sanctuary to check on the pelican, I asked if I might speak with Daniel. No one had ever heard of him.

I could write a whole book about why I think Obama was the worst president in American history. He was so detrimental to our nation that it is easy to compile a list of things he was the first president to ever dare to do: • The first president to preside over a cut to the credit rating of the United States. • The first president to violate the War Powers Act. • The first president to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf. • The first president to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party. • The first president to abrogate bankruptcy laws to turn over control of companies to his union supporters. • The first president to bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat. • The first president to order a secret amnesty program for illegal immigrants. • The first president to demand that a company

We invite reporters to ask, in every story they cover, whether the news is good for nature. Media outlets might include climate costs and benefits in all business reporting. Data are available to gauge the atmospheric consequences of construction, oil drilling, consumer spending, air travel, and shipping. Why not show it? Another positive step would be a quarterly forest report on losses and gains, fragmentation, carbon uptake and emissions, and changes in protected status. Global Forest Watch already has most of the information online.

What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.

The furious pace of drilling was driven by what was called the “rule of capture,” a legal term roughly translated as finders keepers. Oil beneath the earth doesn’t conform to the niceties of lease boundaries, and a well drilled beside a competitor’s lease might well suck up oil from both. No matter. What you got, you kept. Those who tarried might end up with nothing. Thus, every well was a race.

Sure, I've worried that this will be yet another year in which I'll somehow convince myself, as in every other year, every other relationship, that whatever I see in him must be a mirage - a projection of my own thirst. I worry that this will be as bad as selling off land to oil companies, and offering up land to recreationists who think they are in love with the idea of wilderness, of preservation, but really have the worst carbon footprint of all. I worry there will be toxic waste. I worry that the prehistory - the way I was before these casualties - will be erased, and I'll never claim the whole human I once was. This is the grand illusion. That we were once whole. That our ecosystems were intact, self-sustaining. That everything we need is within - and to need others is as vampiric as drilling for every last drop of oil. If this is why we seek solitude, we are in danger of extinction.

Oil that was drilled in Texas or Saudi Arabia, by contrast, was known as “sweet” crude because it had very low sulfur content. This made it a lot cheaper and easier to process—you didn’t need coker towers to take the sulfur out. So many of America’s oil refineries sprang up around the Gulf Coast because that’s where sweet crude was imported and processed. Very few firms wanted to install the kind of expensive equipment that ran at Pine Bend, but Great Northern had done so. When Paulson took over, Pine Bend was one of very fewer buyers in the upper Midwest that offered to buy Canadian crude. Because there were so few buyers, the Canadian crude piled up—there was an excess of supply. This meant that prices dropped. Koch could buy the sour oil at a price that was significantly lower than oil prices elsewhere in the United States. But the cheap Canadian crude was only half of the equation. When Koch turned around to sell the gasoline it made at Pine Bend, it sold that gasoline into a midwestern region where there were very few other refineries, causing supplies to be relatively tight and prices high. This made the economics of Pine Bend almost too good to be true.

He’d seen so much solid ground dissolve beneath his feet he could have freelanced as an oil drill.

It helped McClendon and Ward that many veteran wildcatters still were licking their wounds from years of troubles, leaving them unable to spend much cash to compete with Chesapeake. The new company often acquired dominant positions in oil and gas fields and told those holding acreage in the area that they had to come up with their share of money to participate in Chesapeake’s drilling or sell their acreage to Chesapeake. It sparked grumbling among landowners who resented having to fork over scarce cash in an economic downturn to drill with young operators with little track record. McClendon

I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.

Everything around you is touched by oil. Plastics are petroleum products. Foodstuffs and transportation of the foodstuffs, and everything else, are dependent on oil, and, ridiculously, our nation is dependent on foreign oil. Many Americans don’t realize that our government, unlike other countries’ governments, prohibits the sale of our domestic oil on the open market. That outdated export ban needs to end. Also needing to end is the bureaucratic prohibition on drilling for our own safe, reliable energy sources. Alaskans have been fighting for the right to drill on our state’s northern shore for decades. The vast majority see the government’s refusal to permit exploration and drilling as a nonsensical federal overreach. Tapping a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—two thousand acres out of nineteen million uninhabited, frozen acres—would give us access to billions of barrels of oil that can be safely extracted and give a huge boost to our economy and energy independence. Oil in the ground is useless. Oil in the hands of American entrepreneurs and job creators means new products, lower prices, and improved national security.

Exploratory wells located invariably by a set of deterministic seismic interpretations are drilled into reservoirs under uncertainty that is invariably poorly quantified, the geologic models yawning to be optimized by a mindset that is educated in a data-driven methodology.

Pollution from garbage, sewage, and agricultural fertilizer runoff, combined with overfishing and spills from offshore oil drilling, may kill off edible sea life completely by 2048.

The fossil fuel companies, in short, are no longer dealing with those Big Green groups that can be silenced with a generous donation or a conscience-clearing carbon offset program. The communities they are facing are, for the most part, not looking to negotiate a better deal—whether in the form of local jobs, higher royalties, or better safety standards. More and more, these communities are simply saying “No.” No to the pipeline. No to Arctic drilling. No to the coal and oil trains. No to the heavy hauls. No to the export terminal. No to fracking. And not just “Not in My Backyard” but, as the French anti-fracking activists say: Ni ici, ni ailleurs—neither here, nor elsewhere. In other words: no new carbon frontiers.

No one has more legal power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream whose treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the rush to drill under the Arctic’s melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods would be jeopardized by an offshore oil spill. Whether they are able to exercise those rights is another matter.

Spindletop Fishtails flap and screw through earth’s cradled womb through heaving sands and ocean floors for fortunes crude and wildcat dreams for days of easy living. Earth retaliates with rotten eggs and busted drills but her resistance spent the caprock crumbles and exhales and like a newborn slapped she screams the scream which marks the birth of a spanking new-sprung era. Jubilant the fathers dance Stetson’s tossed high into the air their faces flecked with bootblack gold their hair slicked back with glistenin’ oil. Their upstart child’s a heifer to milk until it moos then trade unto the butcher’s block for meat when it goes dry. Enriched in the meantime between breakdowns rain and air turns to poison rivers flood the poor starve. We’re all wildcatters with the gleam of gold in our eyes and the spray of crude on our faces.

Today, Israel has no producing oil wells. However, a huge natural gas deposit was discovered in January, 2009 a few kilometers off of the Israeli coast near Haifa, estimated at $15 billion in value, making it one of the largest natural gas finds in history, and potentially making Israel energy independent.  Drilling for oil continues in other areas of Israel. Author Joel Rosenberg speculates that Deuteronomy 33:24 (Asher will “dip his foot in oil”) will mean that Israel will discover massive quantities of oil, which will entice Russia and the listed Muslim nations to invade, to seize the sp(oil).

oil companies study the rock formations carefully before they drill a well. Yet, despite their scientific analysis, seven out of eight wells drilled turn out to be dry holes. Oil companies are persistent in their search for oil, not by digging one hole to ridiculous depths but rather by experimenting with a new well when good judgment says the first well won’t produce.

Andrew Hall may be positioning himself now for the next coming boom cycle, but the market will need more than the predictions of some good traders to turn around. One thing that absolutely must happen is a real and measurable leveling off of production here in the U.S. Early in the bust phase for shale, with crude prices, budgets, and rig counts collapsing, I was of the opinion that indeed, production cuts would come a whole lot sooner than either the EIA or most of the bank analysts believed was possible. But I’ve been impressed by the free flow of capital that has come in to the markets looking to ‘save’ shale oil companies from their excesses, and slowing what I thought would be a violent progression of bond defaults and outright bankruptcies. In a recent note on the state of E+P, Morgan Stanley also noted the trend, when one of its analysts, Evan Calio, wrote: “Secondary offerings have been positively received by investors as a means to shore up balance sheets and pre-fund drilling programs in light of falling crude prices. Secondary offerings remain a logical way to delever [a financial term meaning to reduce debt], but also has the potential to extend the trough rather than hasten its arrival.” (emphasis mine). In other words, there is too much money still chasing oil for a quick weeding out of the weaklings. We might see a longer period of ‘survivability’ before the real wall hits.

All of us, every day, inherit problems we didn't create. Motherfuckers get greedy with oil, and everything we buy gets a lot more expensive. Motherfuckers get uppity in another country, and we and our friends and family are expected to leave home to fight and die. Motherfuckers make management mistakes in distant offices, and the house of cards collapses, leaving everyone to scramble to make a living and feed our families. Motherfuckers botch a drilling operation in the ocean and fuck up the environment for the rest of us. Motherfuckers go crazy and shoot up a McDonald's, or a bank, or a school. Motherfuckers do dumb shit, and we have to deal with it.

Oil and Gas Investing in Permian Basin-Smart Move As the true scope of Permian Basin is being understood, one thing is very clear; it is going to attract a lot of investment. As in case of all oil and gas investments, the sooner you invest, the better your returns are going to be. Right now is the perfect time for oil and gas investing in Permian Basin. There are a lot of benefits of choosing to invest in things other than the property, shares and stocks circuit. It not just helps you spread out your earnings, it lets you test potential markets such as these. As these markets are not overcrowded, there is more scope for growth. But why should you choose oil and gas investing in Permian Basin when you have dependable assets elsewhere? The answer is that those assets multiply at such a slow pace that you forget they are there while when there is an oil and gas boom, it turns your fortunes. An oil well investment brings with it years of steady income with the benefit of tax deduction on the investment. It is not as much a gamble as it is made out to be and oil strikes are more frequent than people would like you to believe. About 15% annual income from oil and gas wells is exempt from tax and 65-85% of your first year's investment can be waived off. Gone are the days when all you could do with oil well was bore increasingly downwards, vertically. Now there is technology available that lets you draw oil supply for a long, long time after the initial vertical bore runs dry. With new advancements in drilling and extracting techniques, a lot of oil that was earlier as good as not being there has suddenly become readily available. Being with a company that is well equipped with the latest technology gives your investment more stability. That is one of the reasons for a revival of the boom in Permian Basin and it has been predicted to last for a long time to come. Choose with great care a reliable and experienced company that is a seasoned hand at oil and gas drilling and production. Oil and gas investing in Permian Basin is bound to attract many investors looking to be a part of the upward trend. Invest today and reap benefits for years to come.

If the drilling can’t be stopped, why not benefit from it? The Borough would be glad to see some benefits from the oil buried under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which covers a fifth of the Borough’s taxing territory. And the Borough isn’t the only one. Except for a few environmentalists, most Alaskans are disgusted with Congress’s prohibition against drilling in a piece of their state. These Alaskans see it as another example of the U.S. treating Alaska like a colony—allowing liberals in Washington to make decisions about land they’ll never set foot on. Of the few people who have set foot in the Refuge, most are Iñupiat.

Apparently, you didn’t attempt to talk with the people of Kusoq, who now have to travel over thirty miles and more to get their tuttu—caribou. Why? ‘Cause the tuttu migration got altered by the development of Prudhoe Bay and the connected oil fields. Let me tell you, you open up the Refuge and you open up the Beaufort Sea for offshore drilling. There can’t be offshore drilling without a land base and that land base is the Refuge. And your Assembly is opposed to offshore drilling.

Neither the State nor the Borough can draw revenue from most offshore drilling, since their taxing authority stops three miles from the coast line. But the State is more likely than the Borough to benefit from it, since the oil companies will have offices in State’s big cities and create jobs there. And the State doesn’t care a jot about whaling.

In the 1920s, he decided that it was cheaper to drill for oil than to buy the overvalued shares of other oil companies. After the 1929 stock market crash, he completely changed tack; he saw that oil shares were selling at a great discount to assets, and he turned to prospecting for oil on the floor of the stock exchange—in

Rhoda, my mother, was what the neighbors euphemistically termed "a difficult woman." Her misery was like Texas oil: You could drill anywhere and find some.

In addition there are those who do the right thing but give up too readily. They will drill until noon, but give up because it took too long and it is getting too hot; at 1:00 P.M. they would have struck oil! They will drill through the sand until they hit rock, but then they quit; it has become too difficult. Three feet deeper and they would have hit a gusher! Hope leads to perseverence that gives one the patience to continue in spite of delay or difficulty (I Thessalonians 1:3).

You know, for a Sagittarius, you make a really great Scorpio,” I deadpan. “Too bad for you, I’m a double Cancer. It would take a deep-sea oil drill to pierce through my shell. So, how about we cut the shit, and get back to sudden death?

By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we don’t already know. The battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. It wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.” “By what?” “By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day. “Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

Harnessing disagreeable people isn’t always easy. It helps if certain conditions are in place. Studies in oil drilling and tech companies suggest that dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when people feel committed and supported—and that cultural misfits are most likely to add value when they have strong bonds with their colleagues.

That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.

the Syrian delegation to the United Nations ended up, in 1948, in the tiny town of Benton in southern Illinois. They were there to seek out a certain James Menhall, who had emigrated decades earlier from Syria to the United States. Menhall had come up with several patents for portable drilling rigs, and had developed some producing oil wells in the small oil fields of Illinois and Kentucky. He was their man. But because of political instability in Syria, he was not able to start drilling for another eight years, not until the spring of 1956. Within half a year, he had discovered commercial oil. Unfortunately, shortly after Syria merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic under Nasser, Menhall’s concession was canceled, with no compensation.

Most of our projects in the last few years have been soil and drilling samples thinly disguised as marine research which really means looking for new oil reserves for the conglomerates.”  He leaned back in his chair unable to hide his irritation.  “I’ll tell you this, corporations have become the puppet masters behind the government.”  Emerson exhaled heavily.  “This is not the same Navy we started with, gentlemen.

And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.

Saipem, an Italian-based company founded in 1957, has built some of the world's largest energy and infrastructure projects. It is organized into five business divisions that focus on onshore and offshore drilling, engineering and construction, and conceptual design services. Given its connection to oil and gas contracts, which effectively collapsed in 2014 with a plunge in oil prices, it has had to set a course beyond fossil fuels and rethink everything about its business. This "change or die" scenario sets the tone for its reporting and disclosure. Its 2019 sustainability report acknowledges the scenario it is facing and tackles the issue of the low-carbon transition head-on. At its core is the organziations rallying call, or "the four challenges," which describe the context and frame the opportunities it must capture to remain competitive.

The Arizona Republic story showed that the oil companies themselves were responsible for reporting how much oil they drilled on the Indian reservations: the companies would drill wells, pump the oil, and then report to the government how much oil they had taken out of the ground. The government was not effectively double-checking the companies’ reports to verify how much oil they were actually getting from the Indian reservations. The whole thing worked on an honor system, and the Arizona Republic alleged that firms were abusing it by consistently underreporting how much oil they pumped out of the ground. The stories said that oil companies were carting off at least millions of dollars in free oil every year.

One reason why the fracking boom caught everyone by surprise was that fracking had been around since the 1970s. The technology failed to deliver any meaningful results for forty years. It was simply too expensive to be economically viable. Fracking, in fact, was only kept alive thanks to repeated government intervention. The fracking industry was essentially a ward of the state for decades, kept alive by lavish government subsidies, tax breaks, and government-funded research. In 1980, a federal law called the Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act included a tax break for natural gas supplies produced in unconventional ways, like fracking. The purpose of the tax break was to nurture new energy sources. The tax break was stupendously generous, providing 50 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas. The so-called Section 29 tax break remained in place for decades. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated in 2007 that the tax break would cost the federal government $3.4 billion between 2007 and 2011 alone. The federal government also stepped in to support the frackers with long-term, expensive, experimental research. It was the kind of research that private companies were reluctant to provide for risky technologies. The government-run Sandia National Laboratories developed the three-dimensional microseismic imaging that made fracking possible. A federal project called the Morgantown Energy Research Center, or MERC, partnered with companies to set up experimental drilling operations to put fracking to the test. It was two engineers with MERC who patented the vital technology to drill horizontally—or directional drilling, as the industry called it. In 1986, a Department of Energy program, partnered with private companies, was the first to demonstrate a multistage, horizontal fracture in the Devonian Shale. In

Historically, the 1 percent have always been indifferent to the interests of society or the majority. But today they are especially dangerous. In their single-minded pursuit of short-term profits, they fail to gauge not only the depth of the crisis, but also the threat it poses to the long-term health of the capitalist system itself: they would rather drill for oil now than ensure the ecological preconditions for their own future profits!

These deals were part of a strategy that Koch had been formulating for over a year. Koch saw something in Eagle Ford. It was something that others also saw, but that Koch was the first to exploit. While production was flat until early 2010, the number of drilling rigs had more than tripled in just over a year, from thirty to 104. This number was a leading indicator. The wells would start pumping, and new oil would start to flow. Koch Industries was poised for the change. The wells being drilled into southern Texas were the face of an energy revolution that would redefine global oil markets and the American economy. They were part of a once-in-a-generation transformation that crept up quietly and then changed everything. In one short decade—from 2005 to 2015—America went from being the largest importer of refined petroleum products to the largest exporter of refined petroleum products. A country that was once the poster child for peak oil discovered that it was home to oil and natural gas deposits that were likely larger than those found in Saudi Arabia. The entire story about fossil fuels was reversed before many people even realized what was happening. These changes were every bit as cataclysmic for oil markets as the OPEC embargo had been in the 1970s. But this time, the changes accrued to America’s benefit. The cost of oil plummeted, OPEC was defanged, and America became essentially self-sufficient as an oil consumer.

You might say that Seaprobe was the perfect ship for pursuing a pipe dream. It was essentially an oil drilling derrick mounted on a sturdy aluminum hull, and it had the machinery to lower lengths of drilling pipe holding either cameras or a giant claw to the seabed.

Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched—some of it even built in inches—so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.

Over the last two decades, unconventional oil and natural gas wells have emerged as the dominant source of energy production in the United States. Despite the complexity of drilling these wells and forecasting production volumes, investors in such assets can take advantage of several mathematical principles to reduce the risk in their portfolios. This article dives into the practical application of the Central Limit Theorem and Law of Large Numbers within the energy sector and explores how the characteristics of unconventional reservoirs and diversified assets can work together to reduce production volatility for investors.

Suppose, for example, Pierre invests the $100,000 in oil and gas drilling and development. In the United States, he’d receive a deduction equal to the entire $100,000 the year he made his investment. So he still doesn’t have to pay more than $3,300 on his total income of $200,000.

The other two types of investments in oil and gas are both investments in the actual drilling operation—and they provide great tax benefits. You can either invest in exploratory operations, also called “wildcat” drilling, or you can invest in development operations.

The important point to understand about commodities is that they have extreme cycles. That’s why the best traders make their money in this sector. And sudden weather patterns or mining strikes can cause tremendous short-term fluctuations, often exploding like a bomb! Unless you’re working with someone who has a proven system, don’t trade commodities. You can invest in them, but tread cautiously. Remember that commodities are all different in their ability to ramp up supply (elasticity) when demand accelerates. It’s easier to cultivate more land for crops or livestock in an era of urbanization, but it’s not so easy to drill deeper for more oil or unearth more industrial metals like iron ore, coal, lead, nickel, and copper. Pulling uranium and the rare metals out of the ground is even harder.

From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth.” They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)

When should you drill for oil? Fissures deep in the ground form randomly, like pores in the gas mask. Below the percolation threshold for those fissures, your drill will likely hit a small, disconnected cluster of trapped oil. Bad investment. Above the percolation threshold, your drill is likely to pierce one giant, connected reservoir of oil. Good investment.

That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

And when it came to rigs, few were more impressive than the Deepwater Horizon. Roughly thirty stories tall and longer than a football field, this mobile, half-billion-dollar semisubmersible could function in water as deep as ten thousand feet and drill exploratory wells several miles deeper than that. Operating a rig this size cost around $1 million a day, but major oil companies considered the expense well worth it.

My mother reinforced this affinity for the natural world. In the grandeur of its design—the skeleton of a leaf, the labors of an ant colony, the glow of a bleach-white moon—she experienced the wonder and humility that others reserved for religious worship, and in our youth, she’d lectured Maya and me about the damage humans could inflict when they were careless in building cities or drilling oil or throwing away garbage.

WHAT ARE THOSE?” asked Jamison as they neared their destination. She indicated fiery gold plumes that winked in the darkness like ghoulish holiday lights as they zipped past. “Gas flares,” said Decker. “Coming off the oil wells. Natural gas is found with oil. They drill for both up here. But they sometimes vent the gas off and ignite it at the end of the oil wellhead. I guess it costs too much to do anything else with it in certain situations and they don’t necessarily have the infrastructure to pipe it out of here.” Jamison looked stunned. “Do you know how much gas we’re talking about?” “One stat I read said each month the gas they burn off could heat four million homes.

Another example of how blitzscaling applies to a completely different type of business is the rapid rise of the shale oil and natural gas industry in the United States during the 2000s. The energy sector scores well on the growth factors we’ve defined. Oil and gas is an enormous, high-margin industry, with a very efficient distribution system. And while the shale industry doesn’t feature many network effects, it has its own source of powerful long-term competitive advantage. In the energy industry, rather than buy land outright, the usual practice is to lease the drilling rights for ninety-nine years for a combination of guaranteed lease payments and royalties. This means that leasing the right land is tantamount to holding an unbreakable monopoly on the oil and gas underneath that land,

That is why InnoCentive tries to frame problems so no one feels excluded from trying. A challenge from a drilling company, for instance, will appear with no reference to the oil and gas industry. “Most people will stop reading the problem as soon as they see ‘oil and gas’ because they will think ‘I’m not from the oil and gas industry,’” says Spradlin. “Our model is about throwing a very broad net to avoid limiting it to the same old experts.

frack a single well can take as many as six million gallons. In 2011, petroleum companies drilled twice as many new water wells—2,232 across the Lone Star State—as they did oil and gas wells.