Ms. Catherine

Allow me this one time to brag a little, please...

This is Ms. Catherine as an aspiring actress in California (she still gets residual checks !)....

...and this is Ms. Catherine as a world renown model.

On the right is Ms. Catherine, 30 years later, yesterday morning coating the top of fiberglass water tanks at one of our tank batteries. She is a helluva hand and it's hard for me to keep up with her sometimes. She'll tackle anything; she can weigh drilling mud, take viscosities, back a pipe trailer, correlate casing collars in a cased hole log and perforate for production, run a Bobcat, tally pipe, paint cattle guards, use a cutting torch; she loves the oilfield. I am a lucky son of a bitch.

While OPEC, Russia and the rest of the world want desperately to regain market share lost to the American shale oil sector, shale oil itself uses credit/debt to gain as much market share as it can, within its own country. Nobody in the world can compete with the money the American shale oil industry borrows. It's leveraged oversupply of oil and gas keeps prices low and volatile, its sucked all the capital out of the rest of the industry, likely never to return again; its CEO compensations, flaring and whining for government handouts has turned an already angry public against us all and is likely speeding up the rush to renewables movement. The American shale oil phenomena is essentially destroying the rest of America's domestic oil industry.

Not us. Not yet. My family and my extended family, people that have worked for me for 40 years...we're still standing. We pay our bills and tell the truth. Ms. Catherine is an example of how unwilling we are to give in, to quit.

These are not the hands of an American shale oil CEO. These are Ms. Catherine's hands, the hands of an American stripper well operator.