A new energy "Golden Age" has dawned - Welcome back Phillips 66!

The newly re-established Phillips 66 company is to order 2000 crude oil carrying rail freight wagons as pipeline systems are swamped by growing demand!

I was proud to be associated with Phillips 66 as their Marine Manager for Europe and Africa, based in London, when we opened up the North Sea Oil Production Era with the pioneer direct loading from the Ekofisk oil reservoir,  via sub-sea well heads and a jack-up oil/gas  separation rig the Gulf Tide directly to the 35,000 dwt 'Theogennitor' oil tanker in the early 1970s, just as Colonel Gadaffi was becoming successful in destroying the West's economy through wildly escalating oil prices and threats of supply interruption.

Earlier at Gulf Oil I had seen the tankers bringing oil to Europe grow from 28,000 tons with a crew of over 60 jump to 326,000 tons with crews of less than 2O arriving at Bantry Bay. These were the developments upon which the post-war prosperity of Europe relied. The predecessors of today's EU looters and moochers such as Van Rompuy, Barroso, Rehn, Barnier et al were then arguing over wine lakes and butter mountains, similarly without a thought for the growth or prosperity of the people of Europe. By the late nineteen-eighties, when the trashing of the sanctity of contracts had even penetrated to the heart of the oil and shipping industries, I went "Galt".

Ironic then that it is the bedrock of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, the railroad industry, that caught my eye in this early sign of a renaissance, hopefully also soon in integrity and ingenuity. Fitting too, at this moment of EU collapse and especially for me, that it is taking place in the oil industry and that the consequences of the intervening abandonment of standards in business, most clearly noticeable within the now increasingly evil EU, I had chosen to chronicle under the blog titles Ironies and Ironies Too!

If there is to be another chance of an economic revival in Britain, as the North Sea brought in the closing decades of the last century, then the Coalition Government needs to ignore the vested interests of companies such as Shell and Centrica in their fracking report!

AND

 Get Cracking with Fracking - ASAP!

Younger readers unfamiliar with the underlying connotations of Route 66 may enjoy this Nat King Cole version of one of many songs written on this one road:

Further reading and food for thought from today's New York Times.