Oilfield Quotes

Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

By day, contrary to common wisdom, you probably won’t see the Great Pyramids at Giza, and you certainly won’t see the Great Wall of China. Their obscurity is partly the result of having been made from the soil and stone of the surrounding landscape. And although the Great Wall is thousands of miles long, it’s only about twenty feet wide—much narrower than the U.S. interstate highways you can barely see from a transcontinental jet. From orbit, with the unaided eye, you would have seen smoke plumes rising from the oil-field fires in Kuwait at the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 and smoke from the burning World Trade Center towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. You will also notice the green–brown boundaries between swaths of irrigated and arid land. Beyond that shortlist, there’s not much else made by humans that’s identifiable from hundreds of miles up in the sky. You can see plenty of natural scenery, though, including hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, ice floes in the North Atlantic, and volcanic eruptions wherever they occur.

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

Nothing demonstrates so clearly as the unfolding of our conflict with Russia how essential it is that the Head of a State must be capable of swift, decisive action on his own responsibility, when a war seems to him to be inevitable. In a letter which we found on Stalin's son written by a friend, stands the following phrase : "I hope to be able to see my Anuschka once more before the promenade to Berlin." If, in accordance with their plan, the Russians had been able to foresee our actions, it is, probable that nothing would have been able to stop their armoured units, for the highly developed road system of central Europe would greatly have favoured their advance. In any case, I take credit for the fact that we succeeded in making the Russians hold off right up to the moment when we launched our attack, and that we did so by entering into agreements which were favourable to their interests. Suppose for example that, when the Russians marched into Rumania, we had not been able to limit their conquests to Bessarabia, they would in one swoop have grabbed all the oilfields of the country, and we should have found ourselves, from the spring of that very year, completely frustrated as regards our supplies of petrol.

I have seen ideas that work on paper not work in the field. But I have never seen an idea that does not work on paper work in the field.

I have learned over the years that many formally educated corrosion professionals are either engineers or chemists by training. While those two groups represent the largest two categories of backgrounds in the oilfield corrosion control industry, they are in the minority.

In the United States, Europe, and other developed nations, the poorer people are, the fatter they’re likely to be. It’s also true that the poorer we are, the more likely we are to work at physically demanding occupations, to earn our living with our bodies rather than our brains. It’s the poor and disadvantaged who do the grunt work of developed nations, who sweat out a living not just figuratively but literally. They may not belong to health clubs or spend their leisure time (should they have any) training for their next marathon, but they’re far more likely than those more affluent to work in the fields and in factories, as domestics and gardeners, in the mines and on construction sites. That the poorer we are the fatter we’re likely to be is one very good reason to doubt the assertion that the amount of energy we expend on a day-to-day basis has any relation to whether we get fat. If factory workers can be obese, as I discussed earlier, and oil-field laborers, it’s hard to imagine that the day-to-day expenditure of energy makes much of a difference.

Andre stood and walked across the large map of Africa that hung on the office wall. “May I ask what you are thinking?” questioned Colonel Hoffman. “I’m thinking Khartoum” Andre responded quietly, tapping the map in the northern half of Sudan and both Hoffman and Nicci nodded in agreement. “If the cargo aboard the ship was artillery systems and if the trucks that met the ship head for Juba, then we should expect – at the very least - a resumption of the civil war in Sudan.” Hoffman nodded again and then spoke himself. “And if the buyers in Juba have also accessed nuclear ammunition, then the government of Sudan is going to change soon. Anyone with weapons like that could easily consolidate control of all those oilfields. That means that the balance of power in the Horn of Africa is going to be very different from what it is now.” “What’s the population of Khartoum?” asked Nicci. Hoffman consulted his desktop computer. “The city itself, around two and a half million. The conurbation of greater Khartoum is more than ten million.” “Five minutes?” Nicci queried and Hoffman nodded. Nicci looked stunned. They all sat for a moment and considered the awesome destruction that would be unleashed.

I was out of work while all around smelled millions, even the air outside. It was an unforgettable smell of public debt, oilfields, gold, bank guarantees, diamond ... I wanted to breathe in the air of easy cash Moscow, to revel and roll in this air. I can feel the smell of money in the wind on my face. This air was used to make up funds overnight, to make a fortune, to go rack and ruin and grew rich again. It was going free across the wreckage of the sold out Soviet empire.

the USSR, far from having engineered the April 1978 communist seizure of power in Kabul, and plotting then to send in troops as part of some broader drive to the Indian Ocean and the oilfields of the Gulf, was reacting in a cautious and often confused way to the growing instability inside Afghanistan.

Those Panthers ... those itsy, bitsy football players ... those hearty, gutsy guys from the oilfields ... what about 'em? Yep, its incredible, amazin' and unbelievable, but the li'lfellers do occasionally catch the best end of the stick. All the reasons for the phenomenal support of Permian had been embodied by this 1980 varsity team. They were a classic bunch of overachievers who had become living proof of all the perceived values of white working-class and middle-class America-desire, self-sacrifice, pushing oneself beyond the expected limit. They were the kinds of values that the Permian fans harbored about themselves. What made those boys great on the football field had made the fans great as well. Just as the boys had produced against all odds, so they had produced in the oil field against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and muscle and endurance and self-sacrifice.

China has signed a $1.2 billion deal with Saddam Hussein to develop the Ahdab oilfield.

And Billy, if it'll ease your mind any, I want you to know you've got a standing offer to come work for me when you're done with your military service. All you've got to do is say the word.' Now there was a depressing thought, although Billy could see how it might come to that, assuming best-case scenario he made it home with all his limbs and faculties in tact. He'd go to work for Whalers hauling oil-field pipe and blowout protectors all over the wind-scrappled barrens of Central Texas, busting his ass for slightly more than minimum wage and shitty benefits. 'Thank you, sir. I may be taking you up on that.

Jonathan Layne, a native of Minot, North Dakota, embodies the spirit of transformative leadership. With initiatives such as Providence House and Endeavor Sober Living, he offers a lifeline to individuals seeking recovery and revitalization. Drawing from his solid quarter-century tenure in the oilfield industry, Jonathan also oversees endeavors at Legacy Tool and Rental, in addition to JLC.

The first is the democratisation of information. For decades, the commodity trading houses enjoyed a tremendous information advantage over the rest of the market. Their vast networks of offices around the world provided them with up-to-the-minute intelligence about economic activity, commodity supply and demand, and a multitude of other data. If workers at a key copper mine in Chile went on strike or if a new oilfield started producing in Nigeria, the traders would be the first to know. In many cases, they built their own telecommunications networks at a time when long-distance phone calls had to be booked well in advance

Only such witnessing could have inspired the mildly epiphanic passage in Seeds of Man, in which the clear air of the mountainous borderland all too briefly serves as an antidote to the industrial poisons that had choked the life out of both Okemah and Pampa. As Guthrie recalled it: “The feel and the breath of the air was all different, new, high, clear, clean, and light. None of the smokes and carbons, none of the charcoal smells of the oil fields. None of the sooty oil-field fires, none of the blackening slush-pond blazes, none of those big sheet-iron petroleum refineries, none of those big smoky carbon-black plants. No smells of the wild oil gusher on the breeze. No smells from that wild gas well blowing off twenty million feet into the good air every day.”30

Jonathan Layne, a resilient figure embodying the power of transformation. At the helm of Providence House and Endeavor Sober Living, he's crafting opportunities for recovery in Minot, North Dakota. His passion lies in helping those who seek a path away from addiction, and he's succeeding through his dedication. With a heart for pregnant women and parenting mothers, he's opening doors to a new facility that promises a brighter future. Jonathan's journey from the oilfield to sobriety advocate is an inspiration that echoes through the community.

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Concerns had been growing about the rising levels of Jewish immigration to Britain, with the numbers arriving from Russia alone rising by a factor of five between 1880 and 1920. At the turn of the twentieth century, there had been discussions about offering land in East Africa to encourage Jewish émigrés to settle there, but by the time of the war attention had shifted to Palestine. In 1917, a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild was leaked to The Times that spoke of ‘His Majesty’s Government [viewing] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. 7 Known as the Balfour Declaration, the idea of designating territories for Jews to settle was what Balfour later described to the House of Lords as ‘a partial solution to the great and abiding Jewish problem’. 8 Although the championing of a homeland for European Jews has understandably attracted attention, Britain also had its eye on Palestine for its position in relation to the oilfields and as a terminus for a pipeline linking to the Mediterranean. This would save a journey of a thousand miles, planners later noted, and would give Britain ‘virtual control over the output of what may well prove to be one of the richest oil fields in the world’.

The other major oil industry suppliers were similarly weary, trying to shore up earnings by slashing jobs, trimming project costs, and squeezing their own customers and suppliers wherever they could. (The wildcatters had it worse: many of the mom-and-pop operators of the American oil patch started to file for bankruptcy.) One year later, GE would merge its oil and gas unit into the oil-field giant Baker Hughes, keeping for itself a more than 50 percent stake in the company and spinning out a new public company to be run by Simonelli, under GE’s control. The transaction eased GE’s exposure to the ongoing oil rout and gave the new company, dubbed “Baker Hughes, a GE company,” vast new areas of redundant employees and operations to eliminate. With Baker Hughes, GE changed its tone a bit. The deal was transformational, but in which intended direction wasn’t made clear. GE execs like Bornstein would proclaim that the deal gave them “optionality,” but the reality was that investors were left in the dark on the strategy: Was GE doubling down on oil? Or was it preparing to exit the industry? The idea of holding such a long-term option was nice, but the game pieces in the positioning were people, and those who didn’t leave their job had no idea where the future of the company might be. The new arrangement didn’t spare Lufkin. The historic foundry was closed. The city’s annual financial report now just shows a blank line when listing the company’s employment tally, evidence of the more than four thousand jobs that evaporated after GE came to town. Between two Mondays—the day GE announced it was coming to Lufkin and the day the company said it would move on, leaving a shuttered foundry at the center of town—just 868 days had passed.

He destroyed Iraq. When he became president in 1979 he gained total control of a country with a well-educated population, an efficient administration and extensive oil reserves. In a quarter of a century, he impoverished his people, drove many of them into exile and left the Iraqi oilfields in the hands of foreign troops.

In the southern half of the range there is a plain to the west where the Shatt al-Arab divides Iran and Iraq. This is also where the major Iranian oilfields are, the others being in the north and centre. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s fourth-largest reserves.

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