Public Speaking



Petroleum potentates introductions

Petroleum potentates

Though whalers are a thing of the past and wagon trains live only in the memories of very old men, “Pete”, the big provider, still pioneers new fields. It’s a scant fifty years since the bell on a horse’s harness announced that the coal oil man was near and housewives hurried with potato-stoppered cans to buy kerosene for their lamps. Today a look and a smell at Indiana’s Whiting cracking plants unfolds a fabulous story of catalytic progress.

Those days are done when wildcatters set up their pitch in booming oil communities, and showed geological surveys indicating a drilling site “smack over the top of the anticline”, with a bit of ballyhoo to “Hurry, hurry, hurry, Lucky Lew is spuddin’ in”. A modern driller needs a permit issued only upon proof of proper pipeline facilities, and a demand for oil. Geological surveys don’t mean much any more since seismographs map subsurface structures-thus scientifically predicting the potential production of each well.

New frontiers still beckon by means of secondary recovery, a process that puts new life into old fields and turns old pumpers into young gushers again. And prospecting for petroleum in the open ocean among the hurricane playgrounds continues to kindle our imaginations-as oilmen struggle against nature to tap tideland oil from the continental shelf in the Gulf. One of the quirks of wealth is that even with a million a man can still be a misfit. That happened to the petroleum potentate who went from pitchfork to putter in one month after the well blew in. He installed ranch-to-ranch carpeting and bought a boy for his dog; ordered tailor-made underwear and mink manure to raise roses. He has cattle engraved instead of branded, and his guests use sport cars for golf carts. When the old one got all wet, he bought a new yacht for his winter home on the Gulf.

Some oily millionaires carry bankrolls so big they have them put on microfilm to fit in their wallets. The only difference between these men loaded with pelf and those who are poor, is that the rich one worries in bigger numbers. He has to stop using a clip for his money and get bookends instead.

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