“To hell with OPEC”IT WAS a tragic end to a life that epitomised the winner-takes-all spirit of American capitalism. On March 2nd, the day after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of rigging bids for oil-drilling rights, Aubrey McClendon, a founder of Chesapeake Energy and one of the pioneers of America’s natural-gas revolution, died after driving his car at high speed into a wall.
Mr McClendon, 56, was one of the high-rollers of the shale boom—and of its bust. He turned a $50,000 investment in 1989 in Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, into what became one of the two biggest natural-gas producers in the United States, with an acreage of leaseholds almost the size of West Virginia. He was also one of the champions of natural gas as a relatively clean fuel compared with coal, and an advocate for freeing America from dependence on Middle Eastern oil. “To hell with OPEC”, he was fond of saying.
Yet his ride was a white-knuckled one even by the standards of America’s oil industry. He quickly seized on the potential of two emerging technologies, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1TVf7ak
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