texas Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Bankers Anonymous

November 20, 2013November 21, 2013

Rage Against the Machine – Oil & Gas News Coverage Version

Morning News Rant

Do you find yourself eating your morning granola, hunched over the financial news, stopping in the middle of a paragraph, feeling your eyes glaze over as your BS-meter tilts red in 0.6 seconds, and then looking up at the window to start mumbling like a deranged person to yourself about the absurdity of that business story?

Reading the newspaper and getting upset — Grumpy investor reading the news!

You do?

What a coincidence, because so do I! That’s so weird! It’s like we’re twins!

Well, ok, not so weird, because you read Bankers Anonymous and you understand that’s one of our conditions – the daily, and perhaps hourly frustration with the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex’s faulty depiction of events that affect our lives.

Why do I bring up our common condition today?

I’ll tell you why.

I live in South Texas, where the development of fracking fields is in the process of revolutionizing energy production in the US. I believe the consequences of this process, for everything from renewable energy, to regional job creation, to potential environment liability, to geopolitical and Middle Eastern politics cannot be exaggerated.

As a result, I read what I can about business developments in my regional back yard, both in the local paper – The San Antonio Express News – and the Wall Street Journal.

The local paper’s coverage has its flaws[1], but I want to pick a fight with a story today in the Wall Street Journal. I have found that of the two papers, only the Wall Street Journal covers the Eagle Ford Shale stories from the perspective of national and international public and private equity firms, and I appreciate this, since it’s missing from my local paper.

I should also say my following rant pertains not particularly to the oil and gas or fracking industry, but rather practically any industry covered by the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex.

The part of the story where my BS-meter hit red

The WSJ story describes the sale of Texas shale-driller GeoSouthern Energy Corp to Devon Energy Corp for $6 Billion, the largest acquisition of the year in the US in the oil and gas industry. (Pretty important news, which at least 24 hours after the announcement, the local paper still hasn’t touched. But I digress.)

What gets my goat is a quote buried in the middle of the story by “Wells Fargo energy analyst” David Tameron. Tameron says:

If you are private[2] right now and you can sell yourself, you do. If I’m a buyer and there are a lot of people who want out the door, it’s a good time to be buying.

Maybe this quote was taken out of context, and if so, I apologize to David Tameron, Wells Fargo energy analyst, for what I’m about to say.

My interpretation of Tameron

I interpret Tameron’s statement as:

“If you’re selling an oil drilling company, it’s a good time to do that. Also, if you’re buying an oil drilling company, it’s a good time to do that.”

This is an absurd ‘analysis,’ by David Tameron, Wells Fargo Energy Analyst.

Tameron’s statement goes unchallenged by the Wall Street Journal as the self-serving, churn-inducing statement that it really is.

In the real investing world – not currently occupied by either David Tameron, Wells Fargo Energy Analyst, or the Wall Street Journal reporter on this story – there are attractive times to invest $6 Billion in an oil and gas drilling company, and there are less attractive times.

Most of the time, for real investors, we can not be sure whether it’s an attractive time, or not, to be making a $6 Billion investment in an oil and gas drilling company. Because it really depends on a lot of unknowable future factors, not least of which are the future input costs and output costs for oil and gas, both of which are volatile.

Some time in the future, we may eventually know whether it was a good time to be a buyer of GeoSouthern Energy Corp for $6 Billion, or not. The answer may even change a few times in the future, again, because markets fluctuate.

From an investor’s perspective

What I do know, however, is that it’s not simultaneously a good time to buy and a good time to sell.

Wait, I need to be more specific. For investors in the transaction, it is not simultaneously both a good time to buy and a good time to sell. From an investor’s perspective, it will end up being a good time for one side, and a bad time for another side, some time in the future.

From the brokers’ and the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex’s perspective

But the investor’s perspective is not shared by brokers or the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex.

For financial intermediaries (brokers) who buy and sell companies – or stocks, or bonds, or currencies, or real estate – its always simultaneously a good time to buy and sell the same thing, since this is how they make money.

And for members of the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex, of which the Wall Street Journal is among the most important and sophisticated, it’s always simultaneously a good time to buy and to sell. Because transactions create events, which in turn gives them something for them to talk about. They are not investors but rather cheerleaders.

This Eagle Ford Shale example this morning – like the several or dozens of financial transactions a day we vaguely witness passing through the peripheral transom of our financial mindshare – just reminded me of the different incentives we have when compared to the united front of brokers and the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex.

The Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex needs to churn a story every day, that’s how they get revenue.

And brokers – represented in this example by David Tameran, Wells Fargo energy analyst – need to try to churn a transaction every day.

As consumers (victims?) of the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex we get hit with somebody else’s strong bias – the need to constantly churn transactions.

The truth that this does not help us think straight about investing – in fact it undermines our ability to think about investing – is rarely mentioned.

You and me, I guess we know this. We are, somewhat, occasionally, immune. But what about the rest of the folks out there, fed the disturbingly wrong, the self-servingly biased line, that it’s always simultaneously a good time to be buying and selling?

Sigh. Time to finish my granola.

[1] Fine, since you asked, what’s wrong with the local paper? The local paper only covers the Eagle Ford Shale with three themes. A) Fracking = Lots of Jobs! B) We need to invest in the roads in south Texas that are being hurt by super-heavy truck traffic! C) There are plucky wild-catters trying to make money here. Of these, stories A and B are true as they go, and C is absolutely, totally, and completely misleading, since wildcatters comprise approximately 0.0001% of the activity in the Eagle Ford. As far as the other potential stories of the Eagle Ford, the local paper does not cover them. These might include: a) Environmental impacts b) The national and international businesses doing deals in South Texas, and their relationship to high-profile public and private equity firms c) Technological innovation in the fracking process in the past 10 years and d) the revolutionary impact of 90 years’ worth of affordable energy on our lives as well as on the renewable energy business.

[2] “private” in this sense meaning the fact that GeoSouthern Energy Corp is owned privately, it has no public shares outstanding.

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November 22, 2012July 3, 2013

The Natural Gas Revolution Part VI – Has It Killed Renewables In Our Lifetime?

Here’s my hypothesis[1]: The abundance of cheap domestic natural gas – what I’m calling the Natural Gas Revolution – makes “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar financially untenable, and possibly unnecessary, for the next 90 years.[2]

I can’t prove my hypothesis because energy pricing is complicated.

Figuring out the ‘price’ of energy derived from traditional fuels such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear is not as straightforward as it may seem. I’ve made an attempt based on a conversation with an official at my local utility company. But every financial assessment depends on a series of assumptions: from the future price of input fuels, to regulatory changes, to models that take into account the depreciation of assets such as a nuclear or coal plant.

We know that energy produced from nuclear and coal plants has relatively low prices, partly because, in the case of my local utility, it bore the cost of building the nuclear and coal plants long ago. As a result, we can afford that energy. We also like the price of natural gas, because both plant construction and current market prices are low.

On the other side of the ledger, my local utility in recent years added solar- and wind-derived energy to its energy portfolio, both of which cost considerably more. At a free-market price, wind power would be about 50% more expensive than natural gas energy, but a federal government Production Tax Credit (PTC)[3] brings the wind-energy price within the range of natural gas-derived energy.

Solar power is even more expensive than wind. Solar may cost three times as much per KW hour as natural gas – assuming current technology – but with a federal subsidy through tax credits,[4] solar energy can be priced at a cost about twice as expensive as natural gas.

The energy provider of my home city targets a ‘portfolio mix’ by 2020 of 20% ‘renewables’ – at this point primarily wind and solar energy.[5]

As a retail consumer, I pay 9 cents/Kilowatthour on my energy bill. This retail price reflects a blend of energy costs from the utility’s primary sources of nuclear, coal, natural gas, and renewables, plus the cost of administration and delivery to my house. The price per KWhour could be brought down, somewhat, by prioritizing energy sourcing purely on a cost basis, which would favor coal and nuclear, and increasingly – given the natural gas revolution – natural gas. Wind and solar make less sense on a pure cost basis without the federal taxpayer subsidies that make them feasible for the local utility.

My local utility has chosen to build a portfolio to include wind and solar energy; as a person with environmental sensibilities, I see the benefits of this and I feel good. In addition, from a risk-mitigation perspective, the utility wants to stay ahead of regulatory changes which may make coal production more costly[6], or periodic events that make nuclear untenable[7], or market prices that would increase the cost of energy from natural gas.

So the local utility embraced wind and solar in part as a reasonable portfolio hedge against the risk of high natural gas prices.

But the future price of natural gas, and the likely range of prices for gas[8], just shifted massively with this natural gas revolution. Folks I’ve spoken to in the natural gas sector forecast 90 years’ worth of known, accessible, cheap natural gas in shale rock formations. All of this natural gas we really had no way of bringing to market just 4 years ago.

As a result, from a purely financial perspective I fear we’re locked into paying extra for renewables in a way that makes much less sense than it did just a few years ago, before the natural gas revolution started.

Fans of renewable energy are not going to like this message, I know. In the largest sense, however, it should be seen as good news, and I’ll explain why.

It’s a huge economic boon to the entire country.

So why is cheap natural gas such good news? For the majority of consumers the natural gas revolution will benefit their pocketbooks in subtle but important ways.

A drop in the price of energy impacts the price of nearly everything, keeping goods and services cheaper than they otherwise would be. Just as expensive oil during the Oil Embargo of the 1970s kicked off a round of intense inflation, cheap natural gas will act to keep inflation contained in the future.

To ask people to throw away cheap energy and adopt expensive energy is a lot like asking everyone to throw away cheap food to consume expensive food.

The closest analogy I’ve come up with for renewable energy is the organic food movement.

Organic food works on a small scale, with a dedicated group of true-believers who eat food as an expression of their values. It’s interesting to think about, but I’m not betting on widespread adoption.

Of course I’m in favor of organic food, and I serve it to my daughters whenever I can. I’m happy to pay a little extra for the pleasant feeling of using fewer chemicals on the earth, or to support happy, free-range chickens. The vast majority of food consumers in this country, and the world for that matter, however, do not have the luxury of paying more for food today for some intangible or unvalued long term benefit, even if it ‘costs’ more in terms of health or environmental impact in the long run. The organic food movement pushes against the immutable logic of the wallet.

Similarly, renewable energy has required people to express their values through their energy consumption, paying more for something that impacts the earth less.

I’m generally in favor of renewable energy, and I would love for more things to be powered from solar and wind generated energy. Unfortunately renewable energy is a luxury, and it just became even more so with the natural gas revolution. The risk of future natural gas price spikes decreased dramatically with this revolution, making a portfolio including renewables less financially relevant than it was until recently.

Most people live in a resource-limited world, where cheap food or cheap energy is not a choice, but a necessity. In my city, San Antonio, for the 25% of residents and 30% of children who live with daily food insecurity, the organic food movement exists in a parallel, irrelevant universe.

Most people I talk to don’t seem aware that the natural gas revolution of the past 4 years has made renewable energy untenable, financially. for the next century.

I see two reasons not to mourn the financial marginalization of renewables right now.

The first is purely financial since the tax subsidies needed to close the gap between wind and solar and more ‘market-based’ energy sources such as natural gas would have to grow in the future rather than shrink.

The second is more political. This next point is more my instinct than provable fact. But here goes: Whenever you have an important business – like renewable energy – wholly dependent on government subsidies, the opportunity for power-brokering by public officials and ex-public officials becomes extremely tempting. More than tempting, it’s inevitable.

I have a real issue with ex-government employees who go out and create ‘green energy’ investment companies, which fund companies whose major source of income is government guaranteed contracts for expensive energy in the form of wind and solar. Since it’s all divorced from market prices, there’s a huge opportunity for influence peddling and government favors for former public servants.

There may be some of this going around in my city of San Antonio, but there are also big national examples of this. Yes, I’m looking at you Terry McAuliffe and your GreenTech Automotive. Most egregiously, I’m looking at you, Al Gore, and your New York Times-reported net worth over $100 million, largely built on this power-brokering technique,[9] earned in just 12 years since leaving office. I’m very sorry you weren’t president, but your way of making money since then disgusts to me.

As the gap between the cost of natural gas energy and government-subsidized renewables grows in the coming years, one of the main externalities of the renewable energy sector is the opportunity for government graft. So I’m not just concerned that we’ll pay more than necessary for energy, but I’m also convinced some of our public servants will make sure that the green energy industry pays them back handsomely for their support.

See also Part I – Mad Max Bizarro World

Part II – Big, Corporate, Well Capitalized

Part III – The Drilling and Fracking Scene

Part IV – How Big Is This?

Part V – The Labor Market

[1] I can’t prove this with data, hence it’s only a hypothesis to be tested over time. But I still think I’m right.

[2] The natural gas revolution is happening mostly in the United States right now, in the Eagle Ford area of Texas, as well as the Bakken in North Dakota, and the Marcellus Shale of the Eastern US.

[3] Created by the Federal Government’s Energy Policy Act of 1992, which allows energy providers an income tax credit of 2.2 cents/KW hour. Assuming a current natural gas energy derived price of 4 or 5 cents/KW hour, we can estimate the ‘market’ price (before PTC subsidy) of wind energy for the local utility at around 7 cents/KW hour.

[4] Solar tax credits tend to be Investment Tax Credits (ITC), providing 30% of the cost of development of a solar plant.

[5] With a minimal amount of ‘landfill’ gas supplying a third alternative source of renewables. My local utility’s published description of their mix of energy sources now and in the near future can be found here.

[6] If environmental regulation made utilities pay out of pocket for ‘carbon offsets’ for example, coal could become much more expensive.

[7] Like periodically happens, e.g. 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

[8] At the risk of stating the obvious, I believe the natural gas revolution means low natural gas prices at low volatility for decades, perfect if you’re a utility company forecasting your energy portfolio needs.

[9] No, I don’t have a breakdown between fees he’s earned on his movie, speaking fees, and his income from serving on the board of private equity firms that value his power-brokering to the ‘green-energy’ industry. Kleiner Perkins made him a partner in 2007 and it wasn’t really for his investing acumen. I just don’t think he’s rethinking the entire private equity business with his Generation Investment Management Fund, the way he describes in this WSJ Op-Ed. Instead, I think he’s probably doing the same old power-brokering that becomes available anytime a big industry becomes completely dependent on government contracts and subsidies.

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November 21, 2012March 13, 2013

Interview Part II: Pawn Shop Owner Fights The Good Fight

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This audio interview is a continuation of an earlier interview with Shirley, in which we talked about her pawn shop, and the customer service they offer that banks rarely offer.

In this portion of the interview Shirley and I talked about serving the traditionally Hispanic West Side of San Antonio, and the barriers to trying to build something new and beautiful on the West side. The barriers come from the neighborhood, city government, and even from within.

Shirley: My name is Shirley, and I’m a long-time pawn-shop owner.

Michael: Thanks for joining me on Bankers Anonymous, Shirley. I really appreciate it.

I had a conversation with my friend Shirley, whose family has run a pawn shop on the West Side of San Antonio for 50 years. In the course of the discussion I learned about the type of customer she serves, who typically is under-served by the traditional banking sector.

I learned something else though, about the challenges of trying to get ahead in the world, if you come from the West Side of San Antonio and try to do something good in that area.

Michael: Who is your ideal customer or regular customer that you depend on?

Shirley: The average customer that comes into a pawnshop is a woman in her mid-thirties. She is usually a single mom. She’s working. Usually she might bring in something like a television and we would lend a hundred dollars. She would then within thirty days come and pay 120 dollars and redeem that item.

Seventy percent of the time, a customer does come back and pick up their merchandise. It’s a short-term collateralized loan where the person has sufficient — usually the person has every intention of coming back and getting their merchandise. That’s how it’s designed to work. If they don’t, there’s no recourse. We are non-recourse lenders. A person doesn’t have to pay the loan back. We don’t call them. We don’t notify them. We do occasionally send reminders but nothing that forces them to come back and get the item.

Michael: You and I live in the same city. We live in a Hispanic-dominant city. I know you’re located on the side of the city that traditionally is Hispanic. Would you say most of your customers are Hispanic origin? Do they speak Spanish at home, or are they just of origin and it was great-granddad from three generations ago move to that area of town? Do you know that demographic?

Shirley: Demographically it’s ninety percent Hispanic. We do require all our employees to speak Spanish so they can communicate well with the customers. I would say at least half of the customers are Spanish-speaking only. We communicate back and forth between English and Spanish all day long.

So the majority of people are Spanish-speaking, and what’s the most important part for us is that our employees can communicate with them and explain the lending process to them, so that they understand what the transaction is and what they’re getting into and what their recourse is if they don’t — well, there’s no recourse if they don’t pick it up, but explain that whole process to them.

Michael: Do you have a sense that your customers are also going into a bank and they’ve just preferred to do this, or would you say most of your customers never — pretty much never set foot into a traditional bank?

Shirley: Most of the customers don’t step foot into a traditional bank. I also feel like not just our customers, but my employees don’t want to go to a traditional bank. Recently when we tried to change the way we do our payroll, the employees didn’t want to go to a bank either. It seems like traditional banking as we know it may not be what a younger generation or a more recent immigrant generation of people want — how they want to deal with their money.

The market that we serve daily, and we know, we understand the pressures that people are facing just to make ends meet. I think the larger community doesn’t really understand that there’s a whole segment of our population that really is paycheck-to-paycheck, and a weekly paycheck-to-paycheck.

They can’t guarantee that they’re going to get work every single week consistently month-after-month. All these people still have the same needs that all of us have. They just don’t have the same access to credit cards. They don’t have necessarily people to ask to bail them out because most of their families are in the same situation.

There is a sense that there’s a large group of people that get left out of traditional financial services, whether they’re credit cards, whether they’re banks, whether they’re equity loans or even just regular every day, consistent payroll. We’re filling that gap. The pawn industry feels like we’re filling that gap, and we do absolutely no harm to people.

I’m very proud of being able to provide that service to a very large group of people that often get left out. I think that our industry does it clearly and fairly, without doing any harm.

I quickly came to understand an irony of Shirley serving the underserved and unbanked of San Antonio’s West Side with her pawn shop. Because when she had a vision for developing her entire city block, she found barriers on all sides, from the City, from the banks, and even from within. I’ll let her tell her story.

Michael: Can you tell me about the scope of the project that you have in mind that you either are going to do or have wanted to do for a long time? What does it mean, the project you’re trying to do?

Shirley: We are working on a new building within our existing space, but we’re looking at a 10,000 square foot addition, about 5,000 square feet of retail space and about 5,000 square feet of warehouse. It’s going to be a beautiful project here. We feel like we’re one of the only people that are here on the west-side of San Antonio that have done a private investment in the community in many, many years. It’s going to be a really beautiful project. We have a great architect who designed our building, and we’re working with every detail to make sure it’s something that the community can be proud of, that are many long-time customers can be proud of. It’s a whole new retail space, and a whole new building that I think is going to be the pride of the west side.

But barriers came from the City. A special IDZ, or Infill Development Zone, was supposed to make this type of project easier on the West Side, but in fact because of that it became somewhat of a nightmare.

Michael: It’s the Infill Development Zone that’s been hurting you also?

Shirley: It delayed us ten months.

Michael: In what way, what are they doing?

Shirley: We needed council approval for that and there was some concern that we were changing our — I think it’s possible that it was just a miscommunication with the councilman and our neighborhood association, that we were not changing our zoning. We continue to be in a “C2”. We just needed an overlay, an Infill Development Zone overlay to allow us the parking waiver.

Michael: So they create this special zone to help you but P.S., it’s actually another barrier to getting done what you need to get done.

Shirley: First of all, it was very complicated, so that I could not read it and understand it and go myself to council, or rather to the board of adjustments. I had to hire lawyers. I didn’t have to hire lawyers, I suppose I could have hired a consultant but it was complicated. It was very important to me because we’ve been here for fifty years and it was recommended to me to hire a lawyer to help get that passed. The lawyers were very expensive. Then I think unfortunately complicated the issue even further because once lawyers get involved it seems to be more complicated. They didn’t quite seem to understand that we were just asking for an Infill Development Zone.

Delays came not just from City Council and lawyers, but from her bank. This got Shirley to reflect on the financial barriers, the political barriers, and the barriers from within. But she’s still trying her best.

Shirley: Again, I’ve been hitting my head against the wall for two years and I can’t get it done. But I think that for a long time I thought it was me, because I’m not competent enough or strong enough, or I don’t have the qualities that are necessary to move this forward.

I think it’s possible that as a community we feel like “it must be me,” that I can’t get things done. But I think there’s a possibility that maybe in fact that’s not true. There are in fact these real barriers, so even just recognizing that there may be something that’s beyond myself, it’s not just me, that people that are working in these communities, that there are barriers. We have a bit of a hard time navigating them because at the same time this is what we know. But I think that by having our mayor speak the way he does, and having some of the other politicians come in and really working within this community, there starts a change. It’s slow-changing but even just recognizing that we have the power to make that change.

Without sounding too trite about it, I really do think it’s possible. It’s just a recognition that there is plenty of opportunity right here in this community. First of all recognize that it’s actually happening, but then move forward. I think the fact that everybody else is starting to recognize, the politicians are starting to recognize that we have a very powerful voice here.

Michael: I hope you get a beautiful new construction.

Shirley: I can’t wait. I’ll definitely do a big grand opening for everybody when the time comes.

Please Also See: Interview Part I: Pawn Shop Owner on the Unbanked

Also see: Video: Pawn Shop owner turns Politico!

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November 5, 2012November 9, 2012

Natural Gas Revolution Part I – Mad Max Bizarro World

There’s a Mad Max quality to the back roads and blue highways of South Texas these days. I’d been hearing about this strange phenomenon almost since I arrived in Texas 3 years ago, but only recently did I get an invitation to see it for myself.

I hopped in a car with a Texas State Representative this month to tour a drilling site with an independent oil and gas company in the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas.

As the State Rep and I zoom past empty acreage – not unlike Mel Gibson’s Australian outback – we spy on the horizon a small caravan of specialized tricked-out trucks approaching menacingly. As they roar past us, we observe flatbeds full of monstrous piping overflowing with weaponized-looking plumbing on their backs. Ironically these Mad Max vehicles forecast not the last known energy reserves on the planet, but rather the opposite – nearly a century worth of abundant, cheap, domestic energy.

As a relative newcomer to Texas I carry all my prejudices and misconceptions about oil and gas drilling with me. Most of what I knew before my Eagle Ford visit I learned from Hollywood, via Giant and There Will Be Blood.

I found crucial differences between my preconceptions and what we saw there.

Foremost in my mind is that most people I speak with in San Antonio, not to mention the rest of the country, do not understand just how big the Eagle Ford operations are.

If my estimates of investment are anywhere near correct – something on the order of $100 Billion – the Eagle Ford dwarfs USAA, HEB, or Rackspace[1] as an economic driver of the South Texas region.

Second, the scale of financial investment forces a corporate, risk-mitigating approach to operations down there, which is a good thing when it comes to environmental risks, a major concern about Eagle Ford.

Third, the employment boom in the South Texas region is palpable. They need more people than they have right now.

What is fracking and what is the Eagle Ford Shale play?

So here is as good a time as any to explain what I’ve learned about how the Eagle Ford shale ‘play’[2] works, as opposed to oil and gas operations in other times and other regions of the world.

Historically, exploiting oil and gas reserves in many places on the earth has required sophisticated geological and engineering search techniques, seeking large hidden pools of hydrocarbons that can be extracted from a vertical drill in the ground.

A ‘shale’ play like the Eagle Ford, however, is the kind of seemingly un-exploitable geological formation that oil engineers and geologists skipped over for the past century, in their search for large underground pools. Oil and gas trapped in small bubbles between tightly packed shale rock could not be released using traditional techniques until the last decade or so.[3]

A combination of two techniques changed all that: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking).[4] The horizontal drilling allows above-ground rigs to exploit a much broader underground area from which to extract hydrocarbons, and the fracking involves the use of underground explosive charges to blast open tight rock formations, followed by high pressure water, sand, guar[5], and chemical combinations to keep rock formations open long enough for oil and gas to flow and eventually to be extracted by the horizontal pipe.

Suddenly – and by suddenly I mean in the last 10-15 years – exploitation of shale oil and gas deposits trapped in shale formations has become economically viable. And by “economically viable” I mean the oil and gas industry has suddenly found 15 years’ worth of profitable drilling in South Texas and maybe 90 years’ worth of U.S. domestic energy underground in the Bakken, Marcellus, and other major shale regions. Horizontal drilling and fracking has caused an oil and gas revolution.

This revolution is what the State Rep and I have come to see in Bee County, Texas.

Up Next Part II – No Dry Wells in the Eagle Ford

Part III – The Scene at Drilling and Fracking Sites

Part IV – How large is the Natural Gas Revolution?

Part V – The labor market in the Eagle Ford

[1] To name a few overly-referenced economic engines of South Texas.

[2] ‘Play’ in this context is what oil and gas folks call it. Also, I’ve learned that if you’re a Yank and not from around these here parts, Eagle Ford is pronounced as one word: “Eagleferd.”

[3] A little online research reveals that fracking techniques were known and used in the oil industry as early as the late 1940s, with additional advances in the technology in the 1970s, but commercially successful exploitation of shale-trapped gas, using the sand and chemical mix, dates only to 1997.

[4] I only got through one season of the Battlestar Galactica redo that came out a few years back. I think it’s important to acknowledge the rise of their particular Galactica method of swearing (“Frack!”) and the concurrently perfected process of releasing hydrocarbons from closed shale rock. For linguists, this may represent an important example of “multiple independent discovery” in the development of the English language.

[5] I hadn’t heard of guar either, but it’s a common cheese and ice cream-additive, derived from beans in India and Pakistan, lately applied to the fracking process.

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November 1, 2012

Texas Senate Candidate Sadler: Honey I Shrunk The Texas

Paul, can we talk about your yard signs?

What is the deal with your horrible logo and signage?

You placed a little teeny tiny Texas in the middle, surrounded by a red circle, just below your giant-font name.

Look, I’m new to Texas. But even I know that you’re not supposed to lead with the message that “Everything Is Tinier In Texas!”

If you’re elected, do you promise to “Shrink Texas Down to Miniature?”

How about “Remember, Sadler Is Bigger Than Little Texas?”

Do you have a little red circle around Texas because “Texas Is Better When It’s Completely Circumscribed?”[1]

When I walk around my Democratic-leaning neighborhood and see your yard signs I picture you as that character in Kids in the Hall who viewed the heads of undesirables through outstretched thumb and forefinger to visualize “crushing their little heads.” Only in your case, Paul, I read your logo’s plan as “If elected, I will crush your tiny little Texas,” with that character’s strained accent. I like to hold my fingers up to your sign, squint at it, and squeeze my thumb and forefingers together aggressively.

Look, I understand you don’t really expect to win your Senate race in Texas, because you’re a Democrat running for statewide office, and Texas turned Republican in the years between Barry Goldwater and Ann Richards. So you kind of know that Ted Cruz is going to crush your campaign and your teeny tiny Texas even without this yard sign problem.

But for your next campaign? Find out whose brilliant logo idea that was and fire that person.

[1] Huh-huh, he said “circumscribed.” Shut up, Beevis.

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