Adventures

The first adventure book I read as a little kid was Tom Swift And His Electric Flying Machine, about which I remember very little, except that it was exciting, part of a series written in the 1930s, collected on a small town library shelf. Later on, I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, read and reread Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and his lesser works. It was a disappointment to discover that Ian Fleming was a klutzy author, compared to the excitement of 007 movies. I read some vile thriller bestsellers, steered clear of the entire category. Then the glory of Raymond Chandler, goofy plots and splendid first person resolve in pursuit of a solution that made sense. His mature work had humor, romance, and tired professional investigation. I liked the screen version of The Maltese Falcon more than Hammett's cynical fiction.

 

It's important to consider that Ayn Rand was a novelist who penned exciting stories, especially that of an independent, un-socialized architectural innovator in The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged threw me in the path of numerous real life adventures that took several decades to digest. Her ideas became the basis of intellectual work that I felt I had to contribute as a cure to the filthy sewage of constitutional law. In my spare time I made TV product and pitched screenplays. When my career as a showman died in a Disney cubicle, I decided to write a first novel. Flash forward to today. I just completed an adventure novel that I regard as a mature masterpiece. I don't care what others think about it. I'm accustomed to obscurity, ridicule, and hardship. Escape! was worth every hour, day, week, and month of intense dedication.

 

Bottom line, life is an adventure. We learn by exploration, gambling, wading through consequences that test men's souls. If you can retain and cherish a sense of ambition no matter what, good things happen.

 

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A million words

872,000 in publication, the rest of my output archived by the Wayback Machine and shelved at public libraries, or destroyed by WGA. Screenplays had to be renewed every 10 years or they were shredded. Doesn't include my letters, emails, forum posts, published magazine articles, a couple hundred pages that I typed in a tack room by 6V lantern light, and a couple hundred more filed in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. I've written in a penthouse overlooking Sunset Boulevard, deluxe rental houses in Holland, Costa Rica, and Australia, an unheated garret in Hilversum, a basement in London, a cheap Beverly Blvd motel, maybe three dozen offices, apartments, and prison cells, capped by five years in a sheet metal Ozarks dairy barn. A million words became a difficult 40-year project.

 

Was any of it any good? Maybe about half. Do other people write a million words? Sure. Kipling did. The execrable Dickens and Faulkner. Respectable Churchill, Rand, and Hugo. I declined to compete with Beat Generation giants or biographers or fat ladies who cranked out formula romance. Chandler authored a million words, half of which were excellent. I'd like to burn every rotten syllable penned by King and his spiritual ancestor Poe. I don't think RLS or Hammett wrote a million words. Clueless Zane Grey did.

 

I'm not certain that young people read or write. I know two men who collected every Tom Clancy book. We don't have a lot to discuss. A neighbor lady collected every cookbook and diet book in hardcover, plus twenty shelves jammed full of mystical junk. Another gal inquired if I had any dragons in my latest, which I did, although he only survived a single page. The best thing to do with dragons is to slay 'em.

 

The literary enterprise is like a dragon, or it was for me, and it was for Fitzgerald and O. Henry, a hoary, insatiable, insistent, non-negotiable life taker. When a man writes (not applicable to the fair sex, who write more than men do) the business of writing is to pit your wit and wisdom against every other man in human history. No reason to attempt that, unless you have new weapons.

 

http://www.wolfdevoon.net

 

Peelable shims

Life has been interesting, full of memorable details, like layered aluminum shim stock pieces that could be peeled 1mm at a time to adjust the height of little lens assemblies, 48 lens to be converged, no two of which matched in prototype machining or mounting. I bought magic shop smoke powder to assess what was wrong with the cooling system. Three fans blew into the projector, no air flow, nothing but turbulence. I reversed one of the fans and installed heat dissipating fins on the inefficient glass lamp mirrors, to be upgraded with my parabolic chrome-plated design to throw more light than heat in a commercial production model.

Two Lockheed engineers came by with a section of the L-1011 cockpit windscreen. There was a layer of gold film to heat and defog the thick, curved windscreen, and most of them had to be thrown away, because the gold film ripped top to bottom randomly in the middle of the screen and wouldn't conduct current. I adjusted my 3-D video microscope to examine their defect sample, experimented with fiber optic lighting, and saw the problem. A tiny speck of dirt had created a puddle of resistance that ripped molecule by molecule in a vertical tear. I enjoyed helping them. The L-1011 was my favorite passenger plane.

Sometimes I annoyed people. I was assigned to coordinate a business presentation for LRT, the government agency that operates the London Underground system. It was proposed to install a new PA system with video news bulletins to entertain and inform folks standing on hundreds of platforms, which train was next and why it was delayed, if it was. Existing PA announcements were totally unintelligible. I worked with two other men on the proposal, both of them ruling class dignitaries. The finance guy understood and accepted my budget cuts, but the electronics wizard went ballistic. He wanted to sell LRT pricey TV monitors he manufactured. I vetoed it in favor of cheap Hitachi screens that I could get below wholesale because it advertised the brand. The other idea I pushed was sequential audio delay, so the sound marched along the platform in one wavefront, no cacophonous echo.

I was overly fussy about ethics. In 2009, I became slightly famous for busting the SEC, the oil industry, and two professional associations. Presto, I had 25,000 followers on Seeking Alpha, and Felix Salmon at Reuters publicized the story I told about fake "proved" oil reserves and black box probability modeling. Nice bright feather in my cap, but zero dollars and zero cents in consulting fees. Worse, I called the top on Petrobras, issued a Sell rating. Investors saved tens of millions of dollars and wrote glowing thanks. The rules were exasperating. Analysts have to be pure as the driven snow, no money invested, no short selling. I wrote a few more financial articles, horse laughed at BHP's $12 billion acquisition of Petrohawk, and celebrated a young Irish economist who correctly saw that it was impossible to convert and fuel the U.S. passenger car and light duty pickup truck fleet with natural gas ("the Pickens Plan"). There's not enough natural gas in the ground to do 10% of it. Eventually I got a booby prize for calling bullshit on BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, monitoring two dozen ROVs day and night. An editor in Abu Dhabi offered me a weekly column opposite Paul Krugman, $300 for 800 words on any topic I cared to discuss. My first target was George W. Bush and a corrupt oil deal in Ghana. Then the problem of critical elements, shortages of rhenium, gold, and cadmium.

Pity that I never made the leap to digital. I was an analog expert, supply and demand curves and spockets and lighting ratios, tape recorders and vacuum tubes. As a child I assembled radio kits, used a slide rule to calculate antenna lengths, and built lightning arrestors.

What would Galt do?

Duct tape math.

There's a formula on the wall of my writing office, 2 + 1 = 0.  It needs to be updated, 3 + 1 = minus 1.  Three years of writing full time, ten titles, almost half a million words, plus a year to clear land and build a house, left me stranded and penniless, begging the neighbors for day labor at minimum wage so I can buy dog food, cigarettes, Oscar Meyer, coffee, and saltines, more or less in that order of priority. The dog has to eat. Not his fault that he got run over by a FedEx van, dislocated hip, broken foreleg that didn't heal right, blind in both eyes with thick white cataracts and crusty goop that has to be softened and cleaned every morning. He has to be bathed two or three times a week, fighting summer fleas that refuse to die.

Summer doesn't bother me. Winter does.

What would Galt do? -- no phone, no car, no money, no book sales. I have successfully exited organized society, worse than a desert island, ignored by the world and forgotten. Once a day I walk up the hill to fill a couple jugs of water and empty spam from my inbox. I get one email a week on average. The last one was from my brother Roger. My sister-in-law expressed an interest in reading Partners, which is a sort of obscenity, a family curiosity, old nutty Alan, a black sheep destined to starve to death. I had to punch two extra holes in my belt last week.

Have at it, Gail. Read two pages and wrinkle your nose, shake your head in disdain and put it down, never to be opened again, no book review on Amazon, no mention in social media. I swear by my life and my love of it that it doesn't matter.

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Kosmic joke

Exxon's $4 billion Kosmos offer rejected

(This was my debut Alrroya newspaper column published in 2010. That I subsequently wrote and produced an oil industry luncheon video introducing George W. Bush as a "great American leader" goes to show how easily and cheaply a writer can be bought. It took a long time to find photos of W. where he didn't look like a stupid deer caught in the headlights.)


In October 2009, I noted ExxonMobil's offer to buy the privately-held Kosmos Energy 24% interest in Ghana's Jubilee oil field. Based on Tullow maps and well data, I deduced that Exxon was using a medium term $100 per barrel price model to determine how much to bid for the Kosmos stake. No surprise, it matched oil forecasts by T. Boone Pickens, Goldman Sachs, and former CIBC World Markets chief economist Jeff Rubin.

Kosmos promptly accepted the Exxon bid, in a straightforward move to monetize their Jubilee asset. They were out of pocket less than $1 billion funded by Warburg Pincus and Blackstone Capital Partners. Exxon's $4 billion offer would give them a $3 billion profit and zero their risk of development and doing business in Ghana. Kosmos previously reduced their risk by farming out stakes to Anadarko and Tullow, who did the actual work of drilling and discovery. Clever little Dallas-based Kosmos had achieved what all E&P "minnows" hope to do -- get a license, bring in experienced operators, then flip it to a fat supermajor.

Except the wheels fell off and Exxon's offer died.

Who, why, and what killed the acquisition is a convoluted story. It starts at a racetrack in Dallas involving Texas politicians, a Federal class-action settlement, and a Monte Carlo head fake that propelled attorney James C. Musselman from obscurity to VIP status at a White House state dinner for Ghana's President John Agyekum Kufour.

Musselman got his start in the oil business as an investor in Triton Energy. He became its CEO in 1998 when Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and chairman of private-equity firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, bought a big speculative stake in troubled Triton.

Musselman's job was to pump up reserves and sell the company, which he successfully did in 2001, after reporting an operating loss of $383 million. Hess paid a 50% premium to Triton shareholders to acquire the Ceiba oil field in Equatorial Guinea. Musselman and his team were deemed geniuses, and they briefly worked for Hess, until Hess had to declare a $530 million impairment charge and write down 70% of the Triton reserves they paid $3 billion to own.

But that's not how it played in Ghana, nor in Dallas where Musselman and his ex-Triton team founded a new company, Kosmos Energy, in 2003. They were touted as West Africa experts with a new project negotiated by Craig S. Glick, who left Hunt Oil with inside knowledge of  the West Cape Three Points block in Ghana. Hunt acquired 2D seismic data totalling 2,225 km and 264 square kilometres of 3D. They drilled and logged two deepwater wells. Those wells were immediately east of the future Jubilee discovery. When Hunt Oil quit Ghana in 2001, the story gets a little bizarre, clogged in multiple layers of state secrets.

Before he became President of the United States, Gov. George W. Bush was co-owner of the Texas Rangers, which he sold to Hicks. After he left the White House, Bush bought a house in the exclusive Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, down the street from Musselman's $6 million mansion. It seems likely that they knew each other in 2003, when Bush met Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufour in Dakar and urged him to do business with US backing.

Two of Kufour's trusted associates laid the groundwork for a deal with Kosmos. Dr. Kwame Barwuah Edusei, a medical doctor practicing in Washington DC, and George Owusu, a self-styled Ghanaian oil broker living in Houston, formed a company called E-O, rather hilariously registered at a chicken farm near Accra. Kosmos and E-O entered into a written agreement signed by Edusei for E-O and Glick for Kosmos, covering future exploration, production and other revenue: Kosmos 86.5%, Ghana National Petroleum Company 10%, E-O 3.5%. The agreement stated that Kosmos would carry E-O and additionally pay them $250,000 upfront. Kufour appointed Edusei ambassador to Switzerland in August 2004 (to open a numbered account?) and later appointed him Ghana’s ambassador to the White House. Owusu became Kosmos Energy's Ghana representative. Owusu's Kosmos salary, perks and other graft may have totalled $2 million before he ran afoul of anti-corruption due diligence by Anadarko.

President Kufour, after serving two four-year terms, had to step down in 2009. He and his cronies did everything possible to grease the wheels for Kosmos, Anadarko, and Tullow -- signing off on low royalties, 100% off-loading for export, and token involvement of GNPC. President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush made a 3-day goodwill visit to Ghana in February 2008, meeting all 30 tribal chiefs, promising US development aid, and stumping for Kufour's New Patriotic Party, hoping to upstage and deflate perennial opposition presidential candidate John Atta Mills. In September 2008 there was a gala White House state dinner to honor President Kufour and Kosmos boss Jim Musselman. In Ghana, NPP newspapers and radio stations celebrated their fabulous new oil wealth, thanks to Kufour and Kosmos.

All for nought. Social democrat and former national tax commissioner John Atta Mills was elected president of Ghana by a razor-thin majority, after an odd ballot re-run in a remote rural constituency. His first act in office was to appoint a special advisor on energy policy, Tsatsu Tsikata, long-serving patriarch of GNPC who was put in prison and tried for "causing financial loss to the state" when Kufour came to power in 2000. His trial lasted eight years and Tsikata was pronounced guilty, then pardoned when Mills won the 2009 presidential runoff.

Tsikata flew to Houston and visited Anadarko to pick up their Corrupt Foreign Practices file on E-O and Kosmos Ghana. Then he flew to New York and retained Morgan Stanley as financial advisors. Next on the agenda was a $10 billion line of credit from China. George Owusu's and E-O's assets were seized. Kosmos was put under investigation. In 2010, Tsikata flew to China six times, negotiating with CNOOC.

When Kosmos filed a request to sell its interest in Jubilee to Exxon, the government's reaction was slow and comical. In due course, the Energy Ministry said, they would vet ExxonMobil and consider their suitability to partner a Ghanaian oil company. We intend to produce Jubilee gas first, before oil production, because our country needs more electric generation, and we will be working with world class government engineering experts from Trinidad and Tobago. Your $4 billion Exxon deal is imaginary and illegal.

The only buyer Kosmos Energy could talk to was Tsatsu Tsikata.


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