Here's an excerpt or two from it
But all of that glorious news paled against the gleaming possibilities that presented themselves in Russia. No other spot on earth could equal the allure of Eurasia’s hydrocarbon honeypot. The actual quantity of oil and gas beneath Russian soil was a closely held state secret, but what was known tantalized oil and gas execs around the world. Russia already produced close to 15 percent of the world’s oil, and that was with the same rusty technologies employed by Soviet-era drillers. There were reliable reports that Russia held more natural gas underground than any other country on earth—as much as a quarter of the entire world supply. But it was hard to know for sure how much oil and gas might be sequestered deep in the tight shale formations of western Siberia, or how much might be just offshore, on the continental shelf—on the edge of the Black Sea to the south, or the Sea of Okhotsk to the east, or most intriguing of all, in the Kara Sea to the north, in the Arctic Ocean.
There were other factors at play, but some Americans apprehended this price hike as an OPEC plot, payback for
putting American boots on the ground in a sovereign state in the Middle East. The announcement that OPEC would cut production by nearly a million barrels a day—made just a few days before Putin’s arrival at the Kwik Farms doughnut counter—seemed to confirm the fear. American gas prices were certain to keep going up, at least as long as OPEC had us on such a short leash. Thank God for Russia. Thank God for the honeypot of known oil reserves in western Siberia, not to mention the vast untapped reserves off Russia’s Arctic shelf. Lukoil had five Arctic-ready, icebreaking oil tankers on order at that very moment—an investment of nearly $200 million. And Vladimir Putin had pronounced himself ready to provide America’s new not–Middle Eastern fuel supply, indefinitely, in exchange for a little help with the muchneeded modernization of the Russian oil sector
I can supply a link to an epub download if you like ? You can then convert it to a pdf.
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