This was a great post. It clearly describes the life and forces affecting small oil companies in the US and describes their frustrations with many commonly held misconceptions.

I am surprised however about the stabs it takes at regulation and control, though I expect that apart from being costly, these things may seldom be implemented with what seems like much wisdom when considered 'on the ground' by those who are working there. In many places there are those who make poorly implemented or beaurocratic decisions.

Those runing multinational oil companies are interested in prospecting for oil where you have carefully considered doing so. They are still looking for big pockets of oil and gas and are leaving most of the land-based prospecting (of which relatively little is now left, except under the Amazon- so are still working on that... ) to the smaller fish: I guess these operations are happier to take the risk of drilling dry wells for more limited returns.

As has been the case for decades, the big companies have increasingly looked under the seas and in more and more remote locations (even Antarctica and the North Pole fo example).

As we have see recently, some of the biggest oil companies do better out of having their top execs working with their mates to avoid tax, influence regulations and initiate or at least help facilitate wars with taxpayers millions, as finding new reserves of oil has become increasingly hard to do.

They do a rolling trade in profitting from the 'rebuilding work' after wars. For example, as each of the US taxpayers' thousands of $575k tomahawks alone (cruise missiles) (which can actually be made for perhaps 1/100th of that price) does a hell of a lot of damage. The rebuilding work after the conflicts we have recently seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Timor, Africa, etc. essentially involves 'managing' (ie taking over) other people's oil fields and infrastructure, and selling it. For example atm Haliburton wants to sell gas to the Chinese so they can continue to do more damage than the developed countries have done (and are continuing to do) by burning more fossil fuel into more and more greenhouse gases...

Ultimately there are a lot of consipracy theories around yes. But the plain facts are that there are very rich businessmen controlling all these things, from the prices we pay at the pump to the politicians paving the pathway, even the cost of weapons our taxes are paying for. Anyone that spends a few moments to research the costs we pay waging wars is quickly stunned, however when this is done for concocted reasons the rest of the world sees the reasons quickly: Here the damage done to reputations, let alone many decades of good work that America adn others have done in Asia is being fast undermined. Indeed many I have spoken to feel that the hard work and sacrifice they and their fathers made during WWII (and others) is now being laid to waste by recent greed-driven foriegn policy- for what they preceive as a quick buck in a few big boy's pockets.

And Asia's rising global influence is an enigma many in the West fail to understand and often underestimate.

The whole world knows that we need to be finding clean ways (not new ways which war in the middle east so clearly demonstrates) to burn fuel the we don't really have in an environment we can't really burn it in.

We in the free world need to see that supply and demand (and money) is not so much a cause of all the problems, it is just one of the means we can use to acheive our own ends, that is; a tool to build or destroy. We can use it or abuse it, but unless we take the necessary care to and appropriate control of the oil industry (amongst others) through what is left of the democracies we will never find that our use of oil actively supports a future, it will simply continue to destroy it.

Perhaps along the way, other older and wiser civilisations will continue to see through the enormous consumption and advertising we so conspicuously blind ourselves with, and use it to take the ascendancy amidst the smoke of whatever is left.

Regardless, what will be have let to leave for our children in 20 let alone 50 years?