The U.S. oil and gas industry has traditionally been broken down into three distinct business sectors: upstream, midstream and downstream. The upstream sector consists of those individuals and companies who explore for and drill wells to produce the oil and natural gas. The midstream sector consists of companies that...
On November 23, 2021, as the price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil hit $78.50 per barrel, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an order to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to release 50 million barrels of oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Concerned about his declining...
Every Revolution Brings Unintended Consequences
Prior to the dawn of the 21st century, oil and gas drilling in the United States almost always took place in rural areas, out in the countryside and far away from housing developments or other populated areas. As a result, drill sites were most often...
A Life of Work and Service
“I probably have had the furthest thing from a straight-line path to where I am now that you’ll ever find,” Brian Freed, CEO of EPIC Midstream, told us when we sat down for our interview in September. “I started working when I was 12...
It is no secret that the shale oil and gas industry is in the midst of a phase of rapid consolidation, a move that was kicked off by Occidental Oil Co. with its acquisition of big independent producer Anadarko Petroleum in April 2019. Over the past two years, companies...
When, in December 2015, then-President Barack Obama affixed his signature to one of the many omnibus spending bills that congress has sent to various presidents over the last 15 years or so, few could have predicted the massive paradigm shift the act would have on America’s oil and natural...
Most Americans support the conceptual notion of moving away from fossil fuels toward a society that runs on 100% “clean” energy. Everyone wants to leave a legacy of clean air, clean water and an otherwise idyllic society to the generations that come after us. That impulse seems to be...
Jim Wright, Texas’s newest addition to the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), learned the value of hard work growing up on a working ranch — one with its own mining business to boot — near the tiny settlement of Bluntzer, Texas. The lessons he learned at a young age served...
In March 2019, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled the Climate Action Now Act which was a bill that essentially forbids the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords. At the same time Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer announced a new Democratic committee on climate change that would...
“I was truly raised by a village, you know.”
“If you had asked me when I was a little girl growing up in Heidelberg, Mississippi, if I would end up being the Senior VP of Tax at Halliburton, I would’ve said ‘absolutely not.’ It is something that was just inconceivable...
