Petroleum Oil And Gas Quotes

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.

Just as fossil-fueled resource mastery led to more fossil fuels, it also led to more of every kind of resource being available—including the gold, mercury, silver, copper, zinc, natural gas, and petroleum the Club of Rome had predicted would have run out by now.

The 1980s were among the worst periods in the history of the domestic energy industry, amid a glut of oil and slowing demand. An estimated 90 percent of oil and gas companies went out of business and the bulk of the industry’s petroleum engineers left to try their luck in more promising businesses.

OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.

The age of centralized, command-and-control, extraction-resource-based energy sources (oil, gas, coal and nuclear) will not end because we run out of petroleum, natural gas, coal, or uranium. It will end because these energy sources, the business models they employ, and the products that sustain them will be disrupted by superior technologies, product architectures, and business models. Compelling new technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.

Come here and look out this window. You see that contraption down there?” Frank pointed at an automobile sputtering down the street. “I think people are going to buy quite a few of these new buggies and they need gasoline to make ’em go. It may be the thing of the future. There might only be a few gas wagons now, but someday there will be millions of the things. Oil is only twenty-eight cents a barrel right now. But what will it be in ten years?

Leveraging the same technology, unconventional “light tight oil” production is growing at an even faster rate than shale gas. The United States is now producing more than 2 million barrels a day and adding 75,000 barrels per day to production each month. This is on top of the 6 million barrels per day of current oil production. The United States is on a path potentially to pass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer within a decade and is now exporting refined petroleum products for the first time since World War II. Rather than import natural gas, the United States is on pace to export 10 billion cubic feet each day—at a value of some $15 billion a year. On

The part that kills me is their latest wave of commercials.” Serge tipped back his bottled water. “The message now is that they’re against oil. How stupid do they think we are? BP’s new slogan: ‘Beyond Petroleum.’ The name of the damn company is British fucking Petroleum. They’re not beyond petroleum; they’re waist-deep in North Sea crude with the gas pump up our ass …” “Serge, your head’s turning that color again.” “… Or the ones showing cute Alaskan wildlife, wheat fields and wind farms, with the voice-over from a woman who sounds like she’s ready to fuck: ‘Imagine an oil company that cares.’ Holy Orwell, why not ‘Marlboro: We’re in the business of helping you quit smoking, so buy a carton today! ’ …

In 1956 the senior petroleum exploration geologist for the USSR said, The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths. But few people listened to those words. Raymond Learsy, in his 2005 book Over a Barrel, wrote, Nothing lasts: not fame, fortune, beauty, love, power, youth, or life itself. Scarcity rules. Accordingly, scarcity—or more accurately, the perception of scarcity—spells opportunity for manipulators. The best example of this is OPEC, which continues to extract obscene profits from a scarcity of its own creation. Learsy, though, leaves no doubt. He, and many others, the Russians included, are absolutely convinced. Oil is not scarce. We only fear that it is.

When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.

It didn’t infect human beings or animals, just petroleum, reproducing itself in the gas tanks of groundcars and jet aircraft, slowly making the infected oil unstable. Plague-transformed petroleum burst into flame when it came into contact with oxygen, and the oily smoke from the sudden fires spread the bacterial spores on the wind, into more gas tanks, more oil fields, until it had reached every Rusty machine across the globe.

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

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.

The Kalkaska nightscape is dotted with places where the oil companies have punched holes in the sandy soil to get at the petroleum and are burning off excess natural gas in waste flames, which must make the environmentalists just giddy.

Just before Thanksgiving, I met with Bunker Hunt, then the richest man in the world, at the Petroleum Club in Dallas. Bud Dillard, a Texan friend and client of mine who was big in the oil and cattle businesses, had introduced us a couple of years before, and we regularly talked about the economy and markets, especially inflation. Just a few weeks before our meeting, Iranian militants had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. There were long lines to buy gas and extreme market volatility. There was clearly a sense of crisis: The nation was confused, frustrated, and angry. Bunker saw the debt crisis and inflation risks pretty much as I saw them. He’d been wanting to get his wealth out of paper money for the past few years, so he’d been buying commodities, especially silver, which he had started purchasing for about $ 1.29 per ounce, as a hedge against inflation. He kept buying and buying as inflation and the price of silver went up, until he had essentially cornered the silver market. At that point, silver was trading at around $ 10. I told him I thought it might be a good time to get out because the Fed was becoming tight enough to raise short-term interest rates above long-term rates (which was called “inverting the yield curve”). Every time that happened, inflation-hedged assets and the economy went down. But Bunker was in the oil business, and the Middle East oil producers he talked to were still worried about the depreciation of the dollar. They had told him they were also going to buy silver as a hedge against inflation so he held on to it in the expectation that its price would continue to rise. I got out.

Realizing that solar had become essential to oil production, petroleum firms set up their own photovoltaic subsidiaries. Exxon became, in 1973, the first commercial manufacturer of solar panels; the second, a year later, was a joint venture with the oil giant Mobil. (Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.) The Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), another oil colossus, ran the world’s biggest solar company until it was acquired by Royal Dutch Shell, the oil and gas multinational. Later the title of world’s biggest solar company passed to British Petroleum (now known as BP). By 1980 petroleum firms owned six of the ten biggest U.S. solar firms, representing most of the world’s photovoltaic manufacturing capacity.

Lacking a real theory of petroleum formation, early petroleum geologists had assumed that oil and gas deposits must be located in zones similar to those where oil and gas had been found before. They looked, so to speak, for more Pitholes. Because few such areas were known, researchers believed that petroleum deposits therefore must be rare. In reality, new oil was found repeatedly—by wildcatters who, unaware of expert opinion, searched for it in all the wrong places. After many such stories, scientists had become persuaded that petroleum could be found in some form almost anywhere. The main obstacle to finding oil, the famed petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt wrote in 1952, was the conviction that it wasn’t there: “Where oil is first found, in the final analysis, is the minds of men.

a company’s engineers develop new equipment that can pump out more petroleum at a lower cost, the effective size of the reservoir increases. Not the actual size—its physical dimensions—but the effective size, the amount of oil and gas that can be extracted in the foreseeable future.

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.

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev, the USSRs senior petroleum geologist, told a Moscow conference on petroleum geology, “The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.