I served two years as an Electronics & Instrumentation maintenance engineer in an offshore oil & gas platform in the late 1980’s. This book started out as an attempt to share my offshore experiences that may be of interest to general public since most of us never get to visit such places ever in our lives. It eventually expanded in its scope. There is a lot to discuss, traversing the close to four-decade long timeline. Using my personal experiences that sensitized me to the nuances of this massive industry, this book discusses the details of life on the platform, impact of oil & gas industry on the world, the transitions it is going through with technologies such as fracking that is transforming the state of Pennsylvania in USA, where I live now and all the geopolitical implications that brings in. Just as an attention-grabbing example, we can point out how fracking is surprisingly making USA the biggest producer of crude oil in the world, beating out countries like Saudi Arabia! The oil and gas industry is certainly evolving, going through major transformations along with the whole energy sector. Its impact on the world at every point, including the war in Ukraine, provides a lot of material to analyze and understand. Similar to the oil & water that comes out of earth but doesn’t mix well, there are so many countries, corporations, societies and entities that are forced to work together, though they don’t mix well or get along. We will meet them all on this journey!
There are many websites, YouTube links, podcast episodes and images that illustrate points discussed in the book. Listing web links in a printed book makes it inconvenient for the readers to explore the links. To make the process easy, we are listing all the relevant links, chapter by chapter, here. This will also help us keep the links updated as and when needed, in case if a link address goes stale or changes to a new one.