Interview: Dan Doyle: How America Can Break Free from Middle East Oil

But I think it's also interesting to take a look step back and take a look at the oil industry itself. And I think that he's got a very interesting personal story as well.

drilling outside of Abilene and it was going well. But then we went into you know, the cyclical decline in the UH in the eighties. Up dating myself, but it was in the eighties, yeah, oh terrible, and we did you know, it was such a if you go back into the seventies a little bit like now, it was a big oil shock. There were a couple of them, and everybody got into business. Everybody. The rig count was you know, in the seventy nine eighty era, rig count

was five thousand. Every you know, it's all verticals. Then you know they need a lot of rigs, but everybody was getting into it. All sorts of investor programs. When you when it's funny when you're looking over an area, especially out west, now you see all these wells that were drilled back during this time, and it was just sort of a boom. And when the boom came off

was about when I was getting started. And gradually oil price, you know, a good price then was twenty five, but it was trickling down and down and down, and finally it was a bust. And I waited around Texas for a year or so, a young guy, you know, are we going to go or not go? What should we do?

Finally there was nothing left. I moved back home to the Pittsburgh area, and a friend of mine, kind hearted friend of mine, started giving me work producing his commercials forever had something to do, you know, And so I'm doing that and I'm thinking, oh, man, I could do this for a living if oil never comes back. And so I ended up at NYU's New York University's graduate Film school, and I kicked around in the movie business

for a while. You know, I had some success, you know, it was at Sundance, that kind of thing, had an agent and all that, but it really it wasn't for me. I just you know, just sleeping on floor things. And

ideologically I probably was a misfit. And so yeah, you know, I met some great people though, and eventually I started a I thought, okay, enough, so I scrapped together with little money I had and didn't have, and started a rental come up and I started buying equipment and running it out to movies and commercials and a little bit of construction work and got into cameras and generators. We got pretty big, and I used that to leverage my way then to get finally back in the oil business.

And that was the start a frat company, and it just absolutely went off the rails. It was just the worst time because you know, just the same way that you know, the seventy nine eighty boom pushed a bust that I got caught up in. Now I got caught up. I started this in two thousand and eight, the frack company.

I got caught up in the global financial you know, recession and where the banks were failing and too big to fail, great book the intererro Orton and got caught up in that, and it was just the son of a bitch. Excuse me, but trying to get this thing going, and just craziness. You know, the guy pulls a knife

on me in a trailer and he's my builder. You know, just crazy, and then these crazy partners and and you know, I had written scripts to make a little bit of money, and I started thinking, my god, I think I'm living a movie, and so I wrote I started taking notes that eventually got around to writing the book, and so that came out a couple of months ago. But it called the brov, Nuts and Riches a Startup in the Great American Pracking Book.

courage would be a conservative. Yeah, the movie in Hollywood, there's not a chance as soon as you go there. You know, I'm a big fan of James Woods. I loved his movies.

that would be a difficult ride to ho. I remember the eighties, and you know, interestingly enough, Dan, my wife and I we went to our first job was with Texas Instruments in Houston, and so we got there as everything was blowing up in nineteen eighty and it was a boom town. And then we got kind of tired of it, wing to move back home, and then we couldn't couldn't sell our home. I mean, it was just

everything was freefall, it was collapsing. It was amazing what happened to it, you know, the boom and the bust cycles that happened with that. But of course we've seen that a lot with the oil industry itself. I mean, when you look at the boom with the OPEC embargo and everything, you saw oil go up. And I've talked about this a lot on my show in terms of what's going on with the straight of hor moves right now.

With just that partial oil embargo, it was only against Opex oil to the United States.

And really where we buy our oil and gas. You know, we consume twenty million barrels a day of crude, and I know, we'd like to say all we consume everything we have, but you know, that's counting. It's kind of a you're taking bet you equivalencies from natural gas production, and that's not you know, it's it's yeah, kind is true, but truthfully, we need twenty billion, twenty million barrels of crude and if you look, you know, I don't know

if it's by plan or what. But Trump comes in, he's talking drill, baby, drill, and that was the campaign rhetoric. You know, Really we are going into kind of a red count free fall, not free fall, but it's really

coming down because oil prices were really bad. So we were in a bust in February and by by about the fifth of March, we're in a boom because of Iran and the beginnings will probably be a boom and so you know, but but there's been a administration's done a lot, a lot to help us producers and we're taking advantage of some of that stuff to do with BMM spacings and service facilas and all that, and it's really it's really helpful. So he's kind of changing the

bias from what it was in the Biden administration. To oil on instead of oil off, so you have that, and then you have to Venezuela. And Venezuela at best was you know, three million barrels a day back when nex Nixon was president, you know, and it's down to you know, about a million barrels a day. And it's kind of funny because I was visiting a friend at Colorado School of mine's a professor and I'm looking around for him, and uh, I walked into an office and

it's another professor and we just start talking. He's from Venezuela and his wife works on La or worked on Lake Maracaivo for the Chinese. And we started talking. And I get a call from the public assist for the book and she says, hey, I need a story in Venezuela. I go, what do I know about Venezuela? So can you find someone? And I'm like, I'm sitting with this guy, Lois Zurpa, who's a PhD. You know, professor Luis, are you from Venezuela. He goes yeah, he want to write

an article? He goes, yeah, sure, man, let's write an article. So he provided the insight from you know, hands on in Venezuela and talked about the rinko probably not pronouncing it right, you know, the super heavy oils. But what's going to happen down there is Chris Wright is doing a great job. I really think highly of Chris Right. Anybody in the oil business thinks highly of Chris Right.

The US Energy Secretary. He started a couple of companies, but the big one was Liberty, and it's a frack company, but it's a little more than that. And it's a bunch of really smart guys like himself, an MIT engineer. They put this together and anyways, Right is down in you know is I mean physically, but he's pushing. The first thing to do is we get the dilutants that are needed that were kind of embargoed out of or sanctioned out of the picture. And those dilutants immediately boasted

that production by a couple hundred barrels a day. And now I'm hearing that excellent. If you remember Darren Wood's comment it's uninvestible when all the major the CEOs of the majors got together at their house, you know, he kind of broke rags and said, hey, it's uninvestable. Now now I'm hearing excellent s poking around down there, So I think that that they're going to end up pushing it. And if it doesn't go to hell, you know, you know,

who knows politically what happens down there. But if we can keep it together, you know, maybe that all starts going to us instead of the Chinese. The Mexican market is off a little bit, their mind cruds which are essential to our Gulf Coast refineries that require the heavier cruds than the light stuff we're pulling out of shales. You know, there's a difference in gravity is a way

to measure it. But very light, low sulfur cruise. But the refineries need some of that heavier stuff that comes out of Alberta or out of you know, Venezuela or out of the Hopefully he can hear me that someone mowing the lawn outside, but we uh So, anyways, collectively, you round up all this North and South American production and we're about eighteen million barrels and then you start adding in some other stuff. Uh you know, maybe Trump's doing something here and to his point, let everyone else

fix the horror moves straight. You know, the Europeans and Japan and China that are using it because maybe he is. Maybe the ultimately what we end up with is regionalism in the oil market rather than globalism. And so instead of us buying you know, cruits from overseas, we just keep it. You know, recently we keep it here Canada, Canada for about four million barrels a day. Alaska. Trump is opening Alaska Hillcore is a is a big part of Alaska.

It's a real network coming and going, and uh, you know, refinery capacity everything else. But the simplis of terms numbers we're getting with our production, Canadian production and South American production, we're pretty friendly nation production lists. We're pretty close to what we need to be selling.

Know how much of the problems that we see in Venezuela and they're setting on a massive amount of oil compared to any other country, and and yet they can't get it out of the ground. And it wasn't because they didn't want to, like it is with the American politicians. But it's a combination of politics, I'm sure of socialism and confiscation and all the rest of stuff that happened with that. How much of that was a technical issue that can now be solved other than the fact that

to build up infrastructure it takes a time. You can't just turn a switch and have this mass of infrastructure in place.

our problems Venezuela. It's super heavy oil. It's very expensive to extract. That takes us to a separate issue. We'll get the oil prices and you know, I'm sure, but it's a it'll be quick, you know. But again it's you know, it's not there's there's that's the one belt.

There are there are other there are other crew Uh, there is other crew reservoirs in their basins in Venezuela which are more kind of conventional and don't have that low eight degree gravity stuff, which is basically you know, just to the majority of the oil coming out of Venezuela will not float on water. It's really heavy and so it's got to be diluted and refined. It's expensive, so it will play largely into our mix. But you can't have fifty or sixty dollars oil For that to work,

you just can't. And so just by way of example, you know, we're drilling wells in the Powder River basin with another company, I started another startup. But so we drill, we frack our wells back east and then where we frack for higher back east and we drill our own wells out in Wyoming's Potter River. And you know, the well cost primarily driven by steel prices because you run a lot of steel in horizontal wells, a lot a lot of steel, miles of it. And it's coming up

about sixty five sixty seventy per quite a bit. And we were fifty dollars oil. So if you put that in the basket, so you've got the weil costs have gone up an enormous amount, and then you've had you know a lot of inflation in the Biden administration, and so you put that in the basket as that relates to price, you know, pricing to oil prices. And so you go back in time, and the seventy dollars of

oil a barrel. You know, we're all over the place back in fifteen and sixteen seventeen, but we were, we were you know, sixty dollars oil then it was a lot better than sixty dollars oil now. And you know, and then you have more expensive wells. So when when Trump is pushing you know, you know oil in the

fifties and sixties, we don't survive. You can pump a well, you can pump an existing well based on what your lease operating costs, what it costs a lift in transport a barrel of oil that but to go drill it, it makes no sense. That's why the recount was falling all through twenty twenty five and was looking and when it hit fifty five, everybody that I'm talking to, and I'm talking to all the other operators, you know, are saying,

that's it. We were laying down. Harold Ham up in the box and has never stopped drilling for thirty years. And finally, I think it was in janually said that's it. Where land brings down. Can't we can't make funey year. So you can't have energy independence without a decent energy price. So I don't think anyone in my industry wants to

see one hundred dollars oil because it's disruptive. Because one hundred dollars oil has always meant fifty dollars oil, and fifty dollars oil generally are always means one hundred dollars oil. You know that sign curve or bone bus and so really, you know, I'm not the only guy saying it, but we need something in the mid to high seventies, low eighties to continue going. And I'm sure venus Willa needs more than you know. Because expensive than shale, shale is

really cheap. That's all the majors started buying up, you know, permium based independence because shale cycles fast and it's it's cheap. It's a lot cheaper and less time consuming than developing an offshore field. So that's why there's been a shift to it. But but we can't survive at that. It's it's so when we say we're going to cut the energy and prices in half, we're gonna be energy independence, that's not true. You can't do it well. It is.

So tell us a bit about the political history of the the wells from your perspective happening down there.

you know, Excellon lost a fortune. Chevron stuck around because they agreed to abide by, you know, what the socialists demanded, and uh, you know, total energies, you know, the I think he and I might have, the Italian company might have. So they all got they all they all all the deals they had made to go down and spend money and extract oil. Uh, we're all nullified by you know,

Chavez and and his socialism. And what happened is you got a three million barrel uh a day country go to you know, some one million barrels a day, and from what I've heard, it was mainly the military was in charge of running those fields. So uh so now you've got to get the service companies down there and I and I hear they are. I hear they're looking again. And but they're going to want to be backstopped by

the US government. They don't want to go and invest again and and have you know, and have it taken away. From them again. So it's uh, there's going to have to be some work done, and it probably is being done as we speak. I'm just not aware of it. But but it's important. It's important because how many of the what do we owe thirty six thirty eight trillion dollars?

And I probably a lot. And if we could get away from it, I mean, you know, we want to have friends over there, but if we could keep our markets close to home, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing, you know, And I don't you know, the Iranians are not the Venezuelans. You know, it's I don't see them stopping. I don't. I would love to see the straight of horm Roves opened up today, I really would. I mean, longer stays clok better it is. But I

also don't want to see the world go recessionary. And uh uh you know, I don't want anyone to die, you know, any of that, But I just I would like to see uh you know, uh, you know stability over there. But I don't. I don't know that. It's it's never seemed to be possible. And you know, I start this article, I'll put out you know, the best uh you know, the best way to solve the Middle East problem is to leave the Middle East problem and uh you know what I mean, it doesn't stop.

going to stabilize itself. But I don't know, you know, who knows what comes of it. And Venezuela is good for a million plus a day, but the United States is good for thirteen and a half a day a little more. And my concern is what happens in twenty twenty eight when there's another presidential election. What happens you know, if Trump doesn't are, if Republicans don't prevail and keep the House, we're just going to go to you know,

standard playbook of impeachments, and and that's disruptive. You know, they'll try to impeach them again, and you know, all all of that theater. It's just stupid, you know, of course, looking.

some jobs and economic activity. But what about the military that was running the wall fields prior to that.

gone from Venezuela is you know, Maduro. Everyone else is in place, so it's kind of hard to say what happens. I think the longer we're there with peace, the greater you know, the US influences at least an energy business, and hopefully the greater production results from it. But what I was getting at before is back in the States, when Biden was elected, you know, the first thing he does is he makes he he immediately attacks fossil fuels.

We couldn't lease lands, federal lands for a couple of years. It might have been a little shorter than that, but there's a mandatory minerals actors from like nineteen fourteen, whatever it is, you know, mandates. There's a Congress, you know, a law that every quarter there are BLM lease sales.

Biden comes in and cancels it, you know, and just you couldn't lease lands, and uh, you know, and then the people going and they sue the federal government over you know, grasslands or waterfowl or you know birds, you know, predator, predator, you know birds are prey different different things, and and they hold it up even longer. That works both ways, though it's not always detrimental to us. Sometimes it allows

us to hold leases longer. So in a way, what they're doing is is, uh, they go, they go to harm the oil industry, but sometimes inadvertently they help it. And what would be better is to say, Okay, let's look at New York. Okay, you guys want to kill off fossil fuels, and New York the cost of electrical electricity is about forty percent higher than the national average. That this is another article I wrote a bit ago. Is Fox I think, yeah, it was in Fox and uh,

and it's forty percent higher than the national average. Natural gas prices are twenty three percent higher. The child poverty rate child of poverty rate in New York City is twenty six percent. Twenty six percent of all children born in New York City the five boroughs are born into poverty.

And in the meantime, they won't allow a shell gas extraction from the Marcellus, which is a gift all this natural gas, and you know it's clean burning, and you know this and that, and you know a friend of mine is a diesel fuel provider, and the the a lot of a lot of these data centers are being run off of power from the grid, but they're backstopping with diesel and so smity. But but that's always the case. I'm actually all of the above. I think that makes sense.

Use it because we need it, so out of mind win, out of mind solar. It's just you know, you know we can't pay for it. You know, it's got to stand on its own. And you know, oily gas gets certain benefits for you know, attached benefits. And I believe any industry, if one gets it, they all should get it. If if if one doesn't get it, none of us should get it. So it should be fair. But a lot more subsidies go into renewables, and they just don't

really all the money that's spent. They really haven't pushed on the gas out of the way at all at all. In fact, we're burning more coal right now, not as a matter as a not as by percent, but in terms of tonnage we're burning more coal right now than we have ever burnt, and that's because we have to backstock this grid and uh and you need that the power that comes from fossil fuels to do that, you know, on demand. You just don't get that.

happens and what comes out of all this. Let me ask you, you know, we're talking about the straight up moos and what's going on with Ron, and of course part of the problem is not simply just oil. But now we've seen that there's secondary tertiary things that are also produced there, helium for example, fertilizer, things like that.

I know it's all getting affected. And what's really interesting what I can speak to outside of own gas traversing the Straits Hormuza Art is natural gas. You've got a big L and G trade coming through their Iranians Tatari natural gas production is huge, and so what's interesting is natural gas prices are are still sub three dollars at mcf. That's nothing. It's like two eighty this morning. It's a really And you know what, I think a lot of the reasons why is shale extraction has kept natural gas

price is so low. You know, you bring on a Marcellus or Uticul well in Pennsylvania nowadays, and you're talking billions of cubic feet of reserves that come with those wells. They're just enormous. And uh so we have a boom in oil right now, but I don't want to call the bust and gas because gas has not been doing

well for years. You know, if you remember Aubrey McClendon from Chesapeake used to do commercials with T Boom Pickens and and and you know it's crazy wild West times of oil and gas production because Chess Week was more gas. But you know, gas prices were ten dollars in mcf pre you know inflation that we've seen in the last couple of years, and now you know, it gets as low as a buck something, you know, and you know right now at to eighty. You know, people make it

work at two eighty. But we produce a lot of natural gas in America an enormous amount, and we should be using it because it's clean. But you have all this pipe. Natural gas requires pipelines, not trucking, and so we have, you know, all these lawsuits stopping stopping it, and you know, we piped up to New York City. If they would do their own drilling, the state would do really well. The you know, they could maybe create a fund for the poor or or help the poor

in some way. You know, I don't think given money away is ever a way to solve anything but opportunities, you know, And they won't do it because of the climate activists, and it's it's only harms for people. It does nothing for the climate. They do nothing because I just just want to add something. You want to talk about true, true toxicity. Start talking about battery production and acid rain and everything comes with it. You know, smelt horrible,

horrible industrial practice, but necessary. But when you start talking with nobles, you start talking battery production, and you talk talk about strip mining and everything else. And you want drive past an oil well or a gas as well, and there's cows a few feet away from it eating grass. You talk about a solar field producing the same amount of energy and it's a deaths. It's it's a fenced in death zone where the ambient heat is too high

for birds, for really any living. You know, you don't see life around fields.

And rather than rather than trying to make things work with incremental improvements, uh, the because everything is so focused ideologically, they just come in and one just do blanket bands or whatever. And it's not just ideological either. It's the people who are allied for financial reasons with one industry or the other, of course, and so all these things

are in play. But let's get back to your book a little bit, because we didn't talk much about what it's like to be out there in the wall field. I mean, you're taking a big risk whenever you're looking for something like mining or any kind of oil or anything like that. I mean, that's a very very risky business. It takes a particular type of person I think to do that, doesn't it.

much as you can. And there's a lot of really smart engineers, you know, and financial people that you've gotten together, you know, found a way, but it's you never know, you know, we're cracking a well right now in Wyoming we had an issue and you know it could have been really really expensive and really expensive with a gas wells is you know, touching you know, millions of dollars is really expensive. It's not ten thousand dollars. It gets really out of hand quickly, and so there's always, uh,

there's always worries like that, you know. I tell you though, it's for me, you know.

I started coming home on weekends. I grew up in an erie, and I started coming home from Pittsburgh on weekends and we'd all get in this, you know, seven kids, a couple of dogs, and my dad and my mother and we'd all go to the well and uh we would you know, uh you know, screw around a well, you know. And I'm like, my god, this is like legal and it's like treasure hunting. This is great. And so I

switched off. I changed up to a geology major, stayed in school for the remaining three years straight to get caught up, and then came out. And this is kind of in the book, but I came out. We started doing shallow wells. I found some investors and I actually tried to do an asd Uh. That was the first thing I did is I thought, well, I'm going to

do these reg d programs. So I set myself up as a broker dealer nasd SEC Registered broker dealer and went all over the country talking to you know, this old Dodge duster, talking to people about uh, you know,

investing and getting their clients to invest in it. And I found a a guy out in Denver to drill and he'd let me drill with her, you know, And I said, miss it was coming to bell Withather Exploration, a great guy, George Aubrey on Seventeenth Street in Denver, which used to be the Western oil hobs, still a little videos but not not so much anymore. And uh he uh, he goes, okay, I'll let you buy into these wells. And how much you're gonna raise. I'm like,

I'm going to raise two million dolls. And so I come away for three months and I come back and I raised like one hundred. Oh man, you're killing me. But he let me. Uh he took the money anyways, and uh and that's kind of the start. And then I started drilling shallow wells with some guys in the steel business who backed it, and they said, hey, go to Texas and uh, let's go after some bigger reserves

and I kind of talked about that. I went down to Abilene and we were drilling and then hit a horrible downturn, and uh, you know, did the movie thing? Started company up running equipment to move and commercials and other industries, and uh then I used that and you know, started this company up, and uh found a couple operating partners and AH went down to Oklahoma with some builders

and it was an absolute nightmare. They It turns out we wanted a specialty blender of my partners did and and it was uh, we didn't realize there was a patent protected part. And what we did realize though, it was a slumbers a patent and these guys were stealing the parts from slumbers ay and we got It's funny. There's a guy, the engineer I had to call and ask for permission, like, sir, I know the patents expired.

He goes, so what you know this guy Slumbers And I'm like, you see, can we just do one because we're so far down this road. He goes, Now I don't see it, And it's funny mount them on on. Uh the isn't uh with a hell you know you oversee somewhere. But I gotta I gotta get the book to him. After after all these years, I found him.

But then, you know, one thing, you know, one guy ripping us off, another guy ripping us off, and uh and then my partners kind of went nuts and and it's just you know, and it's really a story about it's really just an entrepreneurial sort. It's not about oil and gas as much. It is about starting a business. And it's really the through line. It is if you're walking through hell, keep walking and you'll get there. So uh so that's kind of what it was.

there's American Indians. Uh, there's a lot of a large number of black workers are out there. The guy pumping waterforce now doing all our transfers is a great guy. You know, black guy just in a number of his crew the same thing. And so it's this kind of melting pot and uh and it's and no, but he taught it's just normal and it's great. We're all working together.

And all this stuff you hear about has no application, you know, the social this cultural stuff that you know, one side of the spectrum wants you to believe is true. None of that is true. It's just it's just a great group of people working together. And you know, uh, you know, I was thinking a great picture would be

all these guys. I mean you'd have to ask the minority step out of the picture, but would be all these guys and you know, uh and have a have a picture and say no white privilege here, because there is none. These guys just grew up working. That's all they've done is work, and it's you know sometimes you know, it's just it's tough. I mean, the other night I had to sleep in the Chicago airport because everything was getting canceled and every hotel was booked. I said, okay,

I'll sleep in a chair, you know. And that's kind of that's kind of typical oil field. It's just the level of work and you know, wonderful people and they've got family back home and taking care of them. It's it's sort of the American dream for a lot of them. Yeah, and uh, it's it's really Uh, it's just great to be around them.

and Wall Street success and political success. You know. And so yeah, maybe for that guy, white privilege is a I know we're talking about oil and gas, but sorry, sorry about that. For that guy. Maybe that's that's true, that's true. You know, maybe that guy feels that, but that's a that's a fraction of the conversation a fraction. What about everybody else? You know, they're they're aren't getting any of this. You know, there's no direct path the

Yale or Harvard. There's just work. And that's that's kind of who ends up in the oil business. And and you know, like I said, it's represented by all ages, by all races, you know, by all genders, and uh, you know, we don't see as many women out there is uh is you know, typically they're more manager at all those engineers. But uh, but we've had women worked as bracketts. You know, it's great. Everyone loves them, so they fit right in with everybody else. So it's that's just like.

of time. But they they're just they're just wonderful people, just wonderful.

at drilling, we're looking at mining. I've talked to miners in the last few weeks about various minerals and things like that. These can be very dirty businesses in terms of things that happen, but they are necessary, and there are ways to control that and to moderate that, and we have to be practical about this and instead of absolutist, instead of being ideological. So it's a great story and

it'll be interesting to see what actually happens. Venezuela and I would be all for As I said to you before we started the interview, I said, I'm all for oil, but I'm just not for wars for oil. So it'd be nice to see if we could actually have some peace and prosperity, if we could have entrepreneurship work and manufacturing things rather than all these political prohibitions and wars that are involved in all of this stuff going back

and forth. But evidently, you know, when there's enough money and power in something, it's going to the political class is going to be focused on that. That's one of the reasons why they focus on the core energy businesses that are there. But thank you so much for joining us, Dan Doyle, And the book again is of Roughnecks and Riches, and you can find that Amazon and I guess everywhere. Do you have a website that you sell it directly.

They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are deception intimidation. They desire to know everything about us, while they hide everything from us.