[American Thinker] Mexico is going to cave, and it's not just the tariffs. We've got the Mexicans over a barrel on energy, and if we want, we can wipe their economy out. Without American energy imports, the Mexican economy collapses.
This actually doesn't make any sense. Mexico is awash in petroleum and natural gas. But the Mexicans just can't get it out of the ground. American petroleum engineers were critical to the early success of the Mexican oil industry. From 1918 to the late '20s, Mexico was second only to the United States in oil production, and it was number one in petroleum exports. But the bounty was not fairly shared, and an inflamed Mexican nationalism booted the American oil industry out of the country. The Mexican oil industry never recovered.
Take a look at a map of the Permian basin, the source of millions upon millions barrels of daily oil production. You'll notice that the geological formation containing this plentitude of hydrocarbons extends well into Mexico. But there is no oil development on the Mexican side of the border. They can't get to the oil without our help.
"Our" is in the sense that our petroleum engineers belong to us. We have some 40% of the world supply, and ours are the finest in the world. Institutions like Texas A&M turn out engineers like George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants, who started the fracking revolution.
There's also Scott Sheffield, from the University of Texas, the CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources. He's led the charge into the Permian, and he's back from retirement to take another run at it. Some years ago on Jim Cramer's CNBC show, Sheffield predicted that then-current American oil production of 5 to 6 million barrels a day (mbd) would double. And so it has.
On June 3, he told Cramer that American oil production would rise from the current 12 mbd to 17 mbd, a 40% increase. Most of that increase will come from the Permian.
We don't need all that new oil for ourselves, so we'll export it to countries like Mexico. Like Mexico, these countries will then be reliant on the United States for their economic well-being.
[VictoryGirlsBlog] The story of Audrey Hepburn reminded me of my late mother. No, their lives were not the same. Other than the fact that they were both born in the 1920's, there are few other similarities.
Except my mother never got over her impoverished childhood during the Great Depression, despite the fact that my parents became financially successful. Likewise, Audrey never truly recovered from the greater devastation of World War II, despite her outstanding success.
Audrey Kathleen van Heemstra Ruston was born in Brussels, Belgium, in May, 1929, the daughter of Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra and her second husband, British businessman Joseph Ruston. As a young child she lived a privileged life, bouncing around the capitals of Europe. As a result, she also learned five languages. Hers was an elite childhood.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.