A while back, Fishgrease asked me to write this, so people get a better understanding of the industry. I thought about it for a while and thought that, while it might draw some negative attention to me, it was worth saying.
I am the daughter of the CEO of one of the largest oil refiners in the US. This is part of my story.
I was born in southern California, where my family had moved following my father to his first job out of college. He was an engineering major from a middle class family, one that didn't start from much but ultimately had numerous successes. My uncle became a lawyer, then a state senator, then ultimately a US congressman. My grandfather's cousin cofounded his own business which grew to be one of the largest personnel firms in the country and became quite wealthy. And my father was to achieve great things of his own. But back where we begin, he was just a college grad with a job as an engineer, living in a small condo in LA.
We moved around, following the oil industry, as my father's hard work and extreme dedication to his job kept him slowly climbing up the ranks. But he always made time for his family, and instilled two things in me above all others: a deep repect for science, and a love for the natural world. He was an overgrown boy scout, a man who loved nothing more than hiking and backpacking and camping, and we went on many trips in my youth.
Each time our family moved, I parted from my friends, and there were many times when I found myself with none. Texas's "Golden Triangle" was a low point for me. The East Texas region, known for the three cities that bound it -- Nederland, Beaumont, and Port Arthur -- is the hub for a large chunk of the refining activity in the United States. I tell people that I grew up in the light of the flare towers. But if you've never seen a flare tower, you probably don't know what that means. So let me show you:
When a unit has too much pressure or there is too much of a particular product, they try to divert it to other units or storage; however, sometimes they have no better option than just to burn it. When they do, it's like a second sun. At night, when the refineries are flaring and there are clouds overhead, it lights up the sky for miles and miles and miles around. It becomes a defining characteristic of the region. And it ruins air quality to boot.
As a child at the time, among my many hobbies, I had one that was unusual: I collected paint samples. I loved the varied colors, the names, and the "collect 'em all" challenge, since no store had every color swath in stock at once. I renamed one color -- an ugly brownish gray -- after our city. We lived near a place with the highest cancer rates in the country. We never could get any tree we planted to survive for more than a couple years. How much of that latter aspect is attributable to the oil industry, I don't know, but at the time, I blamed it all on them.
At the same time, a good chunk of my entire town worked for the oil industry. My parents, all of my friends' parents. On multiple occasions, I got to tour the refinery where my father worked. I got to see the huge computer systems they used to control these obscenely large and complicated flows in and out of the cat cracker unit my father ran. This was no Dr. Doom's lair -- there were so many good, hard working people there. People with loved ones, with families, working hard not only to put food on the table, but also with pride that they're keeping the world economy moving. That they're the force standing between our modern world and the collapse into the dark ages that would happen if the oil suddenly stopped flowing.
My father continued to advance in his career, and by the time I was in high school, we were solidly "upper middle class". My parents could have afforded a nicer house and nicer cars and all that comes with it, but they didn't. Instead, they saved up so that they could put me and my sisters through good colleges without us having to come out burdened with debt. But first, they put me through the Texas Academy of Math and Science for my last two years of high school so I could get a head start on life -- even though it meant me living many hundreds of miles away and having to fly down to see them every month.
While I went to college and started my career, my father continued to advance in his career. Soon, he became a president of the US arm of a supermajor and VP of the international branch. During this time, my parents moved into a new, larger house that they live in to this day. But despite his continued promotions, it's not what you may picture. Apart having more land from being on a double-lot, it's not much different from the many hundreds of other houses in their neighborhood alone -- anything but what you'd expect from the position. They live well, but "occasional luxury car well" and "RV well", not "private plane well" or "yacht well". Instead, they started college funds for their grandkids, support their parents, and donate a lot to charity. Until my father's most recent job, despite being 6'5", he still primarily flew from place to place crammed in a coach seat. And he flies a lot for his job. He felt it important to set an example for his employees.
Now he's the CEO of one of the nation's largest refiners. So naturally, his day consists of plotting evil, right? But it doesn't work that way. Do you really want to know what the day of a high level oil executive is like? It's about holding contractors feet to the fire when a construction project goes over budget. It's about trying to keep the right feedstocks reliably coming into your facilities. It's about rearranging trading units so that they communicate with each other better, and trying your damndest to stop one bad apple somewhere underneath you from doing something illegal to make their operations look better and getting your entire company in trouble. And in an industry where a janitor with a careless cigarette can cause an ecological disaster or a trader's careless email could lead to charges of collusion, that's no easy task. But things like planning to blow up wells or hide 100 mpg carburetors? That's the sort of stuff we joke about when I visit them ("Hey, dad, what politicians did you buy off today?"), then shake our heads in disappointment that people actually believe that sort of stuff.
He may be the CEO of a refiner, but he's still the same overgrown boy scout that he always was, and has the same love of science he always did. He accepts global warming. He's climbed Kilimanjaro and has seen the receding glaciers. He just got back from backpacking up Machu Picchu. I've heard him say, on multiple occasions, that he looks forward to the day when something better comes along and puts him out of business -- although I know the he believes such a day will be far off, and sadly, given how many gas-burning vehicles are on the road today and how slow consumers are to accept new technologies or even new fuels, I must concur. I once overheard him discussing with my aunt what sort of car their mother should get. My aunt wanted her to get another giant "grandma boat" of a car. My father? He was singing the praises of the Prius. When I came out, my father slowly came to accept it. Now? He flies to HRC dinners and has made the companies he's run the most friendly for GLBT individuals in the industry.
But that doesn't change the fact that overall, it's terrible that this industry needs to exist to run our society in its present form. The oil companies aren't going underground and packing the oil reservoirs full of carcinogenic chemicals like benzene -- the oil itself comes that way. They're not adding carbon to it to it to cause global warming -- it does that on its own. And while the odds of any single operation causing an ecological disaster are small, when you consume 85 million barrels of the stuff per day worldwide, it's virtually impossible to keep bad things from happening every now and then. This is stuff pried up from (often unwilling) reservoirs miles underground in remote corners of the world by machines costing up to hundreds of millions of dollars a piece, shipped halfway around the world in the largest moving objects ever built, refined through obscenely complex refineries to turn these haphazard collections of carbon chains into specific fuels that meet mandated quality standards, then shipped to every last ma and pa service station on the planet. It's just impossible for anyone to stop all accidents from happening in this scenario.
Even if all of the oil companies in the world were managed by a single benevolent dictator, that wouldn't change a thing. The largest supermajors have nearly a hundred thousand direct employees, and many more subcontractors. A company like BP drills around a thousand wells every year. There's no way a single person can keep an eye on what every last employee or even every last well at all times. There's no overstating the scale of devastation a mid-level manager who wants to get a promotion by boosting his operation's numbers by cutting corners can cause. Do those people exist? YES. In huge quantities? YES. When you have hundreds of thousands of people involved per company, statistically, you'll even have several murderers on staff, probably a few dozen child molesters as well.
Where, then, does the buck stop? Only with the people who make the bad decisions and cut the corners? While that would be the easy way out, and I'm sure the people at the top of BP would everyone to accept that... no. Yes, the head of a company cannot manage all employees or all operations at once. The heads of BP probably knew not much more of this well than its name and general state of operations. They probably couldn't tell you the names of the people who made the idiotic decisions like pulling the mud before cementing was done or continuing operations after drilling through the BOP. But the head of a company is in charge of instilling the culture that makes such behavior scarce. It's their job to hold the feet of their division heads to the fire to make sure that those under them don't cut corners, and that those under them don't either, all the way down. You can never guarantee 100% success. But when you start to see a pattern of failures disproportionate to the size of the company, like I think we've been seeing recently with BP, one should probably turn their eyes to the top.
Is it about money to these people? Sometimes. And some times, it's just about pride. Oil company CEOs make about as much money as college football coaches. There's more variance (the highs being a higher, the lows being lower), but overall, the averages are about the same. We're not talking "Richie Rich" here; you need to look to other industries for that (or to those who actually own private oil companies like the ultra-conservative Koch family). But at the same time, these are people who worked themselves up to running some of the largest corporations in the world. There is an immense amount of personal pride on the line when it comes to having their company perform well. There's also a tendency to become friends with those working under you, and in some places, it can blind people to poor performance. And when these sort of things happen, the accident rate rises.
And every now and then, because of that, an unspeakable amount of ecological damage occurs.
Anyway, I hope that I haven't bored you all with this. And I'm sure there will be people out there who are mad at me, or even don't believe me that there can be people who work in the oil industry -- especially at the top -- who actually are human, who actually give a damn about the environmental consequences of their operations, who actually love to visit the beaches that are at risk from all of this, and so on. It's much easier to classify something you don't like and everyone who works for it as a Great Evil, like the right's image of Obama and Nancy Pelosi. But that's not how the world works in general, and in specific, what this industry is like.
One final note. If you take anything from this diary, I hope it is this: If you could put a supermajor out of business -- or two, or three -- what would be the result? A better world? No; you'd have a bunch of smaller players gobbling up their market and expanding their operations. And this will happen as long as we keep consuming these vast amounts of oil. So please -- go efficient. Go electric. Carpool. Do whatever you can. I'm risking everything I own to run a startup to make software for electric vehicles, to help make them more mass-market. Because in the long run, our oil consumption is just too dangerous and unsustainable.
And as much as my father likes to joke about how his daughter is trying to put him out of business? He's actually my biggest investor.
Thank you.
