Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 01-19-26_MONDAY_6AM

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Morning news catchup then Dan Doyle, president of two American energy companies talks Venezuela oil impact. Spent decades in the industry - His forthcoming book Of Roughnecks & Riches - A Startup in the Great American Fracking Boom.

This hour of the Bill Meyer Show podcast is proudly sponsored by Klausur drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for more than 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausor drilling.com. Call Bill at 541-770-5633. That's 770 KMED. Now more with Bill Meyer. Good morning. And welcome to Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

It's January 19, 2026. Not really seeing a lot of fog in the area, but it is definitely freezing temperatures. 26 degrees on the way in this morning. A little cooler than we thought it's going to be. And it's going to remain this way for most of the week, relatively dry, maybe a slight chance of a shower here and there. That's about it. And then hopefully, you know, winter will then roar in and then just give us a whole dump of snow and rain and do everything else. But yeah, it's pretty dry.

There's no way of getting around that. that. Anything it's on your mind this morning, please join the conversation, 7705-633-770, KM.E.D. And by the way, my email is Bill at Billmyershow.com. Dan Doyle is going to join me here after 630, and he's the president of a couple of American energy companies, and he spent decades in the oil patch. I want to talk with him about this Venezuelan oil. Will it make all that much of a difference? It's, you know, I hear people that are, I've talked with people last week that say it's going to be just an incredible thing, an incredible deal for American energy. And then I have Dan who is a little more reserved in his opinion. He's actually worked within that industry.

So we'll see what he has to say. And he has a book coming out in a while here. And, you know, in a few months, I think is when he has it coming out called of Roughnecks and Riches, a startup in the Great American. African fracking boom. So he's really been involved in the in the fracking situation. So we'll talk with him after 630. We also have Ava Wall's father who's going to be joining me this morning. I think I think his name is Jason. I just got the, yeah, Jason Wall, Ava's father. Ava is the 15-year-old girl who is missing here in Medford. And everyone's been looking for. Everyone's trying to figure this one out. And Ava, 5-6-120 pounds, 15-year-old Medford team reported missing on Friday night. And

she was last seen in the Coleman Creek Road area west of Phoenix between about 820 and 840 p.m. Friday. And she's thinking to have left with an unknown adult. And so we'll talk with the father coming up next hour. Very just terrifying. These are like the worst nightmares of parents. really is. So we'll see if there's any movement on this whatsoever and talk with Jason next hour. Okay. Some of the other stories going on this morning, I wanted to just make sure I have the sound up. Yep, here it is. Here it is. This is where things are going in Minneapolis. I've been trying to, you know, the Minneapolis story to a certain extent is kind of boring to me because, all right, you have stupid people doing stupid things. It's just kind of the same thing, but

now they're stepping over the line, and they're invading church services. This is what happened yesterday. This is the Southern Baptist Convention, and the minister there, or the preacher, is Andrew Walker, who was an ICE official, and so they just go in there a whole bunch of these. I'm not exactly sure what to call them. But not so peaceful protesters. They're out there. They're screaming at the kids.

kids. Town Hall reporting that the protesters screaming in the face of kids at the church and following and shouting out all the young mothers as they were trying to buckle their kids into their vehicle to flee. This is pretty despicable. Pretty despicable. There is no constitutional right to invade a church in protest a church proceeding. There just isn't. And this apparently is what Governor Walls and Bayer Fye have unleashed in their city. As far as I have concerned, the investigations need to happen very quickly. People need arrested and they need put down hard, in my opinion. Now, U.S. Attorney in California, Bill Assali, is responding to coordinated efforts to tip off people to federal law enforcement.

This is coming from Nicarama at Red State. rep Jimmy Gomez reporting ICE activity and encouraging other people to report their activity to the phone number he posted. That's trying to help people avoid federal law enforcement. First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, Bill Assaley, had a great reply that everyone should take to heart. A friendly reminder that the public has a First Amendment right to call the number below and provide inaccurate information. However, it is unlawful to impede federal agents, but there is no prohibition on impeding radical organizations working to harbor illegal immigrants.

Dial-away. If everyone calls in and gives all kinds of inaccurate information, it will basically incapacitate that line and foil the agitators. I hope they go after him too. Meanwhile, we have the Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dylan. Remember I spoke with her a number of months ago, but an Oregon election integrity issue. But she's investigating that storming of the church, investigating the potential violations of the Federal Face Act by these people,

desecrating a house of worship, interfering with Christian worshippers. The Face Act of 1994 created to prohibit intentionally hurting, intimidating, or interfering with, or attempting to injure, intimidate, or interfere any person by force, threat of force, or physical obstruction because that person is or has been, or in order to intimidate such a person or any other person of any classroom obtaining or obtaining or obtaining or attenching or interfering with religious freedom. I mean, all sorts of things is what the Face Act is about. I hope she goes after them.

I would like to see more of these people hauled in, wouldn't you? It just really just irritates me to my core. You know, we can have this conversation. You know, this is something that I could bring up with. with you this morning and get your opinion. I would love the Southern Oregon jury about this. I think what we're kind of witnessing right now was watching a video with Bill O'Reilly,

maybe Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox host. Well, now he has his own online videos and podcast. He does those kind of things. And he had an interesting take on what he thinks is going on. And I think Bill has a good one on it. What Bill O'Reilly is saying is that there is a real battle right now between essentially Tom Holman of Homeland Security, and then we have Ice Barbie,

you know, the director of ICE, Christy Knoam. Is she the director of ICE? I'm starting to get them all mixed up, but one way or the other. You have Homeland Security, Tom Holman, and a couple of other officials. They're wanting to not just do wholesale sweeps right now. What they want to do is concentrate on

just the people who have ice holds, who have deportation orders, and who are the violent criminals. They wanted to concentrate on this first. Christy Nome, apparently, is more of, we're just going to round up absolutely everybody we see anywhere we find it. That's what Christy is all about. That's what Christy appears to be weighing in on. And there's a battle between the two. And when it comes to the optics, do you think it'd be a good idea if we follow Tom Holman's way of looking at things? Or Christy, no.

The problem that we're running into is that now we're getting into midterms. We're getting into the midterm deal. And you have a lot of people who are starting to get really concerned that if you're going to just go after people who have been here 10 years, haven't been causing problems, they've been working, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe have them register. This is what Bill O'Reilly was talking about doing. And he says, get these people all registered. They have a deadline to be registered, so at least we know about you. But when it comes to the ICE agents that are going to be kicking in doors or dragging people out of the cars,

it's going to be the people who really need their doors kicked in and pulled out of the car windows. You know what I'm getting at? That's the way that Tom Holman is looking at it. Kristy Knoem is a little more broad-based. it might help the case right now if everybody that you're pulling through the window right now might be someone, well, like the two clowns in Portland last week, gangbangers from Venezuela and human trafficking and prostitution rings, right? Not just someone who was getting picked up at Home Depot to go do a day labor job. Would you agree with that? That's kind of where Bill O'Reilly is coming down on it. I can understand what he's looking at right now because you can't just look at the law.

You also have to look at the optics right now. If you have an opinion about that one way or another, I'd like to get your take on it. Bill O'Reilly and others are saying this is the battle right now. And over the next week or two, we're going to find out which type of illegal immigration enforcement is going to be done. First, is it going to be the Tom Holman style first in which you are strictly focusing on every bloodthirsty, criminal that has a deportation order, or do you take a broader approach? Everybody you catch gets thrown into it, and then boom, out you go. I think it would be an interesting question to pop by you this morning.

7705-633. Supposedly within the next week or two, President Trump is going to be, this is according to the insider officials, is going to be decided which side of this is going to end up winning the argument. How do you see it? We can talk about that and other things, too. 770-5-633. Hi, good morning.

This is the Bill Myers Show. It is Monday morning. First call of the week. Make it a good one. Who's this? Well, that's a good question, Bill. Anyway, in terms of hauling people out of the window, I think he need to go a little higher upstream.

I'd like to see Biden hauled out of the window. Maybe Schumer 2 and Pelosi. These are the people who are the real. criminals, and yet they're skating along. No one's holding them accountable. That's a trouble what's going on. There's just no accountability for these lawbreakers at the top. Instead, we get immersed in all these squabbles at the bottom, and, you know, you keep the plebs fighting among one another. Meanwhile, these multi-millionaires go to the bank, make lots of money, and have all their multiple houses and so forth and so on, living the life of Riley, if you will.

Oh, and don't forget that they're getting cheap power at our expense for their data centers for AI, right? All of that runs together, but so... Well, well, let me redirect this, though. President Trump was elected on enforcing immigration law, on getting the force of law back in the immigration law. There's probably, I know that for years they've talked about 11 million, right? 11 million illegal aliens. Oh, yeah, that went on for decades. Yeah, I think what we're really talking about is probably more like 20 to 25 million.

If you really had to break it down, you could be, you know, 7, 6, 7, 8% of the population. You know, I could see that being, you know, very ageily part of it, illegal immigrants. But when it comes to the actual, what you're going to concentrate on for the, enforcement side of things first for political optics. And we're talking about political effects, all right, the political effects of this. Because the thing is, if it becomes more tough for the Trump administration to have congressional support, then that whole agenda goes away. It would just seem to me that it would be smarter right now to concentrate on the bloodthirsty, violent, violent criminals, and not just tossing every illegal person that you end up finding who's,

doing landscaping in your community. You know what I'm getting at? I'm just talking about when it comes to what you concentrate on first, and you're getting the really violent ones, like frankly the one they got in Portland the other week. That's a perfect example of a clean, you know, arrest, someone that definitely needs out of here. Bloodthirsty, Venezuelan, Trendy, Arwaoggan gang,

wanted in shootings, violent shootings already, human trafficking, seems like that's a better place to concentrate on it. Would I be wrong about that? That's what O'Reilly was talking about the other day. As you say about the optics, you're correct on the optics and so forth. But I just, I think we're spending too much time on criminals down here when the criminals in Washington, D.C. need to be held accountable. Also, well, that would be really nice, but have you ever really seen the time? I mean, I'm just trying to be honest. I'm very cynical when it comes to,

holding Mordor on the Potomac accountable, okay? If it happens, it's usually by accident, not because somebody really tried to. Yeah, I know, you're right, but, you know, I think of people that are in charge of this country. I think the Schumer, you know, is sort of like after Waco, said all those people deserve what they got because they didn't obey the federal government. And so it's all right to kill women, children, and so forth. And by the way, didn't they give the people awards, or was that Ruby?

Oh, no, that was Ruby Ridge. Wasn't it, Ruby Ridge? The guy killed Becky Weaver and so forth. But, yeah, I mean, we have criminals running this country. If we just keep doing this optics all over the place and never address what's real going. But I don't know the solution because, you know, we get the government. government we elect and we're not doing very good as voters. Agreed. Thanks for the call, Tom. It's a good call to start. Hi, KMEDE. Good morning. This is Bill. Who's this?

Good morning. DePaul Patrick here. D.P., how you doing? Yeah, the, well, okay, the guy that killed Vicki Weaver was Lon Horiucci and he bragged about it. Yep, great guy. And anyway, what had me pick up the phone this morning was I was checking out. I think it was Benny Johnson on YouTube. And he had, as a guest, he had George Papadopoulos. Oh, yeah. Did you catch that?

No, I didn't catch that. No. Well, what was being talked about, and Papadopoulos is a very credible guy. and he was saying that, and I only can't give you a lot of details, but he's saying that what they're planning to do is on the basis of all that is going on with the Democrats, with the assassinations, the attacks on ice, and the harboring of illegals, and whatever other unlimited, whether it's insider stock trading on or on,

is beginning to treat the Democrat Party for what it is, criminal organization. Have you heard about that? No, I can't say I have, but if that's the case, some of what we're seeing would seem to be indicative of that take on it. The question I'm posing, though, is for political expediency and the optics of it, would it be better to take the Tom home-in-way, according to Bill O'Reilly, of going after strictly the ones who have ICE deportation orders going against them and are, you know, really the gangbanger, bloodthirsty types like what happened in Portland the other week that they're trying to defend, rather than everybody that you find you toss into the deportation hopper. What do you think?

Well, I favor all illegals go. You can't have a subset of people who are. are free to ignore the law. However, on a practical basis... I'm speaking of the practical. I'm speaking of the practical right now. What actually works best right now in a time of... In a time of tumult, it's like, how are you defending... Okay, how are you defending the gangbangers and the human traffickers Democratic Party, right?

That kind of thing? Well, I'm... I'm not sure I have the question framed in my mind correctly, but I think that it does make sense to go after the worst ones first. Okay, and that's what I'm getting at. I mean, rather than, now I'm just using this as the example, some guy that wants to do landscaping who is hanging out at Home Depot when I shows up. You know what I'm getting at? You know, it's just, you know, there's, there are different levels of illegal alien,

lethality and problematic, you know, type stuff. I guess that's what Tom Holman was looking at. And his push was to do it, do it based on the ones. We already have a whole ton of them with deportation orders. and concentrate on them, and most of them are the gangs and the criminals and the ones that are really causing the problems in the cities. And Christy Nome has been taking a more broad-based, and the story, this according to Bill O'Reilly, is that this is what is causing a lot of tumult within the Trump administration right now, which side is going to win that argument with the president right now? That's what he was bringing up yesterday.

Yeah, I think the easy shot, I think that's what you're saying, right? Well, that's kind of what I'm thinking, too, if you're going to concentrate on something. And it would also tend to tamp down the, oh, so-and-so is just a, it's just a Minnesota man, or it's an Oregon couple. You know, all they're saying, no, no, they're all bloodthirsty, you know, gangbanger types and the worst of the worst of you really don't want them here. That's all it was getting to then. Appreciate the call there, Patrick. Let me grab another high. Good morning.

Monday morning with the Bill Meyer show. Who's this? Hi. Morning. Morning, Bill. Steve. Hi, Steve. I had the opportunity in college to work in Switzerland for a summer as part of the Yang language program at college.

And they have a unique approach to foreign workers in Switzerland. Yeah. They have a lot of Turks and Poles working there. They've been there for three or four generations. They're on a six-month renewable work visa, and if the economy goes bad, they get sent to a country they have never been to. That's interesting. So what we need to do is treat the worst of the worst like cops treat criminals, and then we do not give any handouts to illegals, no Medicare, no health care, no schooling,

free schooling, nothing. And we go after the employers who employ these illegals, but we do have a very generous work visa program, and that way they're not illegal. And I guess we don't really have that right now, for the sounds of it. We used to. We used to have a program for farm workers, but we don't anymore. And it needs to be above board and very obvious so that people who come here to work are not afraid all the time. And they're not treated like serfs and they're paid a real wage. It makes everything work. And you have to go after the people who are hiring illegals and paying them low wages by raising their taxes and charging double for workmen's comp and and everything else because they are undermining the low American low wage earners. Yeah, the low wage American, yeah, undercutting the, yeah, agreed. Interesting take on that. All right. Use the police to do the bad

guy stuff and use the bureaucracy to keep everybody who wants to work in line because people who want to work are going to police themselves. All right. Interesting point. I thank you for making it. Thanks, Steve. 632 at KMEDA. Do a quick home health check. Have you noticed sloping floors, sticking windows or doors that won't shut? If so, your home's foundation may need attention. And let TerraFerma Foundation systems help.

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Call Bill now. 541-7-70-5633. That's 770 KMED. Now, get back to your calls here in the next few minutes. I wanted to make sure and concentrate on this call, which is Dan Doyle. Dan Doyle, interesting guy, president of two American energy companies. He spent decades in the oil patch, and he has a book coming out next month, of Roughnecks and Riches, a startup in the Great American Fracking Boom.

And you can pre-order this at all the usual suspects. Dan, it's great to get a chance to meet you. sir? Morning, Bill. Nice to be on your show. Yeah. Now, let's talk a little bit about your background because you didn't start out necessarily in the oil patch, but I guess you wanted to go to film school or wanted to go to Hollywood.

Give us a little bit of a background. I love these kind of stories in which you're going in one direction. You're thinking, maybe this will be better. Okay. Love to hear it. Well, you know, it started. My father wanted me to go to pre-dent. I told him I would and switch majors to Susan.

I got to call it. It's been a battle for a while. But I started out in, actually, I got a study geology at University of Pittsburgh, came out, worked in Pennsylvania and in Texas, and we went into a downturn. And, you know, well, I guess when you hit downturn, it's kind of like the one we're entering now. It just lasts forever. And back then, that one lasted for about a decade. I was sitting around a friend back in the back home in the Pittsburgh area gave me a job working on film and commercial crews making good money. I thought I'd chase that and ended up at NYU's graduate film program and kicked around the movies for about a decade or so. And eventually went back to the oil business, started a hydraulic frack company in Pennsylvania. That's still active in the Appalachian and a mid-home basin.

And if you don't mind what section, what section exactly? Because the reason I bring this up is that I was born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, you know, outside of Pittsburgh. So I know this area pretty well. Which towns I'm kind of curious were you doing this in? Well, I started doing it northwestern Pennsylvania, the really shallow oil fields up there. And that's where the book of Roughnecks and Riches is set when I started the frack company. But I ended up mainly Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, some Pennsylvania, it kind of all throughout the Appalachian Basin and Illinois Basin area.

Okay, very good. So you ended up getting back in the oil world, and from the looks of it, you did pretty well because you're president of two, not just one, but two, American energy companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, we're both sides. We produce oil for ourselves, and we frack it for third-party, for third-party fracking. What do you think we would find most interesting of roughnecks and riches? I mean, this is real work, real. I think there's a little bit, there's a lot of science, but a lot of luck involved in this, too, I would imagine. Yeah, it's all timing.

Oil and gas is all timing because, you know, prices go up and, you know, everyone's busy. They go down. Everybody, you know, shelters themselves, tries to wait it out. But most interestingly, you know, Bill, the, it's the effort that, goes into producing only gas. Just incredible effort. And I don't think people can understand. I mean, we just had to shut down a job. I shut it down on Friday night in Wyoming. We're running 24 hours. We had a rig up there and a frack crew, and wind chill was below zero. The winds were gusting the 65 miles an hour. It became incredibly dangerous. And, you know, guys are trying to get stuff done in that. And it's just,

we just had to stop. And, you know, the credit. thing is it doesn't matter if it's a Sunday or a Friday or Christmas Day, Easter doesn't matter. It's a, you got to do it. And it runs 24 hours a day regardless of the weather. And it's hard, hard, incredibly hard and dangerous work, really tough. And that's also the reason why it's for the people who are good at it. That's why it's financially rewarding. It's a good career, too, for those that are inclined to actual, you know, hard work. But satisfying, I guess, is what it would be a good way to describe it, too, isn't it? Yeah, I think so.

I think, and it's not just on the ownership side, but, you know, a lot of people working in oil and gas, you know, kids coming out of high school that get good at it. I've got a friend that, without a college degree, he's a driller, just an amazing guy, and he makes over $400,000 a year drilling wells as a consultant. You know, a lot of people get into it. It's hard, long hours you're away from home. but it's pretty common to hit the six-figure mark. So it's a really good place for kids.

They're kind of mechanically inclined. It doesn't matter if your man or woman, it doesn't matter. And it's, but it is. It's incredibly rewarding. Everybody gets involved in the project, but it's hard. It's really, it's really crazy hard. Yeah. Now out here in Oregon, the state government, it operates under the assumption that we don't

need oil and gas and that we can have, well, just renewable power and everything will be just fine. If I could get you in the same room with these people, do you think there's any way you could convince them of actual physics? Just kind of curious, because Oregon is run by some really stupid ideological people, in my opinion. There's no way I could convince them, Bill. It would require logic and then following logic, and there is no logic in really in the

climate debate or the or energy. The simple fact is we have a hundred and five million barrel a day market. A million or two million barrels can swing prices enormously up or down. Just a small fraction of that 105 million. And in the United States, we produce about 13 million barrels a day. 75% of that requires fracking. If you're just banned fracking, you would see gas prices hitting, you know, 10 plus dollars. You would see the poor, inordinately suffering, you know, we'd be losing heat if there was a natural gas element to all this consideration. It just, it would upend, it would upend everything. And it's just ridiculous. You know, in New York State, they banned high-rate fracking, which is required for shale extraction.

And I remember working there underneath seismic crews, you know, dropping cables out of helicopters to their crews working the ground. And we were five miles from the Pennsylvania border, but they never allowed it. So you had the Pennsylvania farmers with mineral rights just becoming kind of overnight millionaires. And to the north, you had no wealth effect, no wealth effect, even though it's rich ground, really good natural gas ground. And now you have these utility rates skyrocketing in places that, you know, left-leaning, red, you know, blue states, and really, really high, you know, compared to other areas,

and it's all kind of the bureaucracy. And to stop it is ridiculous because wind and solar can't do it. They're passive systems. Solar doesn't work all the time. It's getting better, but it still requires battery backup or secondary. Yeah, and even the newer batteries, batteries have never been and will continue to likely never be cheap. There's a lot of resources tied up in making batteries, isn't it? Yeah, terrible. You know, yeah, the Tesla Power Packs are getting to be pretty good, but nowhere good enough.

And the simple fact about battery production, it requires smelting, which is probably one of the most toxic industrial processes that we've come up with. Smelting is the cause of acid rain. It's the cause of deforestation and the Sudbury Canada area and other areas where it's done. It's absolutely filthy, but nobody wants to talk about it. It's just a left wheel. will not acknowledge its existence. And they like to say clean. They're really, truthfully, I'm all for renewables. I really am. And the odd thing is, oil and gas people are generally like me. Yeah, if it works, say that's great. No problem. Yeah, but the thing is, it has to work. That's usually the operating phrase here. It has to work. It has to work. And the, you know, people like to claim there's no subsidies for solar. It's absolutely nonsense. It is subsidized. It's a big part of

Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which is a ridiculous act, you know, misnamed, of course. And it's, it really, it has to work. But my point is, oil side is, yeah, whatever, whatever works, fine. The other side, anti-phossil fuel is the fossil fuel must die. Yeah. Yeah, it must die. It must die with our religious fervor, you know, that kind of like a crusade. So I wanted to ask you then, now that we have control of Venice,

Venezuelan oil. Now, the type of oil that comes out of fracking tends to be pretty thin, isn't it? Kind of greenish in color, if I understand correctly. A sweeter crude, usually, would that be fair to say? Right, absolutely. Low sulfur. It's got a higher gravity, which is kind of related to viscosity. It's thinner. We, you know, it's funny, all over Gulf Coast refineries, were really sort of built for the heavy crudes. coming, the mine crude's coming out of Mexico, the Arinoco, I've always mispronounce that, coming out of Venezuela, the really heavy, heavy stuff. Yeah, and so that's what I was wondering if, if that is where the Venezuelan oil will have its greatest effect, ultimately, because, yeah, our old refineries actually like this big,

heavy asphalt type stuff that you have to dilute before you can make it either, right? Yeah, that's right. That's the first thing the administration's doing is getting dilutants to Venezuela, which were sanctioned. kind of out of place, and that'll help move those crews. I will say this. I just wrote an article with a friend of mine who's a professor at Colorado School of Mine, is a Venezuelan National. Is that Louise Zerpa, Dr. Zerpa? Yeah. Yeah, exactly, right. And really, it's, the Venezuelan thing is going to take a long, long time. It's going to, it's, it's really an unstable place. The people that were in power last year are still in power, the absent Maduro. The military still

kind of runs things. So there's a lot to work out, and it's not going to move markets a whole lot, not going to move a whole lot just yet. But it's a great thing. We need to develop it for the sake of the people of Venezuela and South America could enrich those people that have suffered. And so I think it's a great thing. And hopefully we can move that forward without much problem, get people invest in it. But just understand it's not going to move the oil markets in the near future because it is it is a relatively small amount of oil per day isn't it like half a million half a million or 500,000 barrels something like that pretty close you know what it does though is that it disrupts the chinese uh you know uh cheap buying oil scheme you know they buy they buy

sanction barrels out of venezuela iran and russia uh at a discount and that's really help you know China and all its teapot refineries and, you know, but, you know, really our actions are kind of putting a hurt on them a little bit, both in Russia and Venezuela and possibly in Iran. What kind of material does fract oil do best at it? And the reason I bring this up is that I was told that when you're looking for the diesel and that kind of stuff, then you like that heavy crude like Venezuela. But for the lighter distillates that. that sweeter crude works better, or am I wrong? Or is it just a matter of what your refinery is designed to handle?

You know, the refineries are pretty adaptable, and the blends that they can pull off are – it's pretty amazing. So, you know, they find a way to make it work. That's kind of an upstream guy, meaning I drill for it. Yeah, that's a downstream – Yeah, you're not a refinery guy, but you probably have some idea what the market demands, right? Yeah, you find a home for all your oil, for all of them. But natural gas sometimes is tougher because it requires pipeline and take away and all of that.

But oil, you'll always find a market. And, you know, the question is how far do you have to go to get to your market? You know, we spend $4 a barrel to move our oil, and that's at the low side. Friends over in Utah, you know, in Wyoming drilling, but in Utah, in the Uwenta Basin, you know, they're paying more than $10 to move their oil and at low oil prices right now. So there's always a market. The refineries find a way to blend it. But, yeah, they do.

The refiners were initially built to run heavier crudes, like the ones we just mentioned. All right. If you wonder who I'm talking to, Dan Doyle is the president of a couple of American energy companies. He has a book coming out on his experiences in the oil patch of Roughnecks and Riches, a startup in the Great American Fracking Boom that comes out next month. I'll get all your information up here. I wanted to, so you're saying Venezuela's not. going to move much here. This is something that I'm concerned about, though, and I'm wondering if

it concerns you, too, in the oil industry. President Trump has been making a big deal. Hey, we're lowering the cost of energy. And that sounds really good. We like that at the, you know, our end products, and it's a input cost for farmers, et cetera. My concern, though, is the actual health of the oil industry, because last time I looked, I remember reading some people in the financial world saying that fracking really needs about $70 to $80 an hour to pencil, or a barrel, rather, to pencil, in other words, to actually make it work economically. Could you well concede that or what? Tell me what happens.

Yeah, 100%. So we have some campaign rhetoric. There were two opposing messages about oil and gas. One, of course, is drill baby drill. The other was, I'm going to cut your energy prices in half. And the one bit of rhetoric in half is become true. Nobody's drill baby drilling right now. Rigs are laying down.

There's a little bump going on right now because budgets are going to get, you know, New Year budgets are going to be spent. But about the second quarter, it will really start laying down. Harold Ham, the billionaire founder of Continental, really kind of a hero to our industry. One of 13 kids, the youngest, sharecropper family, Oklahoma, no money, started out with a single truck and became one of the great pioneers of the modern oil business. And he's just laying down, he's very big up in North Dakota. He's laying down all his North Dakota rigs. That hasn't happened in 30 years. And so, you know, we want to keep drilling, but, you know, it doesn't make any

sense at these oil prices. It's really kind of hard to sell your production, you know, at these low prices, but it's, you know, the market moves up and down. President Trump is a, you know, cheerleader for low prices, but, you know, it's kind of in a way oil is being used for this sacrificial lamb to combat inflation because oil's in everything. And, you know, we're getting there, you know, the Fed wants 2%. As does Trump, I would guess, we're, what are we at 2.7 now? We were at 9 of the previous administration. And I don't know, maybe when we get there, it won't be so bad. But in my experience, you know, during Obama's administration, oil was up over 100.

And, you know, adjusting for CPI, it's probably put it at about 120 consistently through 2013 and 14 until it crashed. And due to the OPEC wanting to kill U.S. production. but it wasn't enormously inflationary. Now, I don't think anybody's saying, let's get back to 100. Most people don't want it because high oil prices lead to low oil prices and low to high. Everybody would like to see a medium. I mentioned Harold Ham. He says about upper 70s.

Yeah, and that's what I was concerned about trying to get some stability in the oil world would be important because the challenge is that you can't turn fracking systems on and off on a dime. right? You just can't steer them that way. Isn't that true? No, it's a big. That's true. It's a big ship. And it's like, you know, how do you stop a super tanker? Well, you just need a lot of space. And, but it'll eventually stop. And that's the same thing with the world business. You know, people like to look at the numbers that say, yeah, but look at all this production and oil prices are so low and you don't need these high prices. That's kind of nonsense. It just takes a while. You know, natural decline rates of, you know, these

Shale Wells are pretty first year horrible. But overall, you know, you're looking at about 5% a year. So this is the Red Queen effect from Lewis Carroll, you know, not through the look, from Alice in Wonderland. And it's like, hey, I keep running, but I'm not getting anywhere. Well, that's kind of like oil. You keep losing every year, so you've got to replace what you lost. Plus, the world needs more. OPEC, who I trust. I like OPEC's, numbers. You know, there's other forecasters that aren't as accurate. But the EIA, which is U.S.-based at OPEC are generally pretty close to each other. There's a group called the IEA, International Energy Administration or Agency out of Paris that is a big, big cheerleader for renewable, so they're

always pushing, oh, we're running out of oil, we're running out of oil, we need to transition. My God, we're running out oil. Well, the truth is we're not. And OPEC says we're going to from 105 to about 123 in a decade or so, a little bit more, which is probably closer to the truth. You've got India coming on and Africa and China is slower, but continues to be a big buyer. And it's not stopping, you know, it's just... But right now, though, the world is a wash and crude. Now, is that because of economic slowdown? That's usually what happens, or is it something else going on? Absolutely. But also, what happens?

happened in 2025, after the pandemic, OPEC plus, which includes the Gulf state countries and Russia, got together and said, okay, after the pandemic, you know, it was chaos. So they said, we've got to take some barrels off the market. So they took a couple million barrels off the market. In early 25, after Trump's election, and maybe, I don't know, but, you know, Trump's first state visit was to Saudi Arabia and two other countries in the Middle East, two other oil producers. It was the same thing, his first term. And, you know, you sort of wonder, you know, all of a sudden barrels are coming off the market. Procedurally, you know, 400,000 barrels a day after, you know, after all of this. And I don't know, then we're bombing Iran, which is kind of an enemy of a lot of the other states in the area, other countries. And I don't know.

You know, Bill, like, I don't know I wasn't in the room, but suddenly, you know, not suddenly, but they start taking these barrels off, and it's amounted to $2 million, meaning putting them back on the market, I shouldn't say off. But putting it back on the market, it was really enough to push us into oversupply. All right. I'm kind of wondering what is the long-term health prognosis

for the oil and gas industry, and the reason I bring this up, I'm talking about the return on energy investment. Because it used to be back when you didn't have to drill deep wells or back when you didn't have to do fracking like you do now, you'd stick a pipe in the ground and boom, you get the gusher. You know, in the early days, you know how that went. You'd see the Hollywood movies and things like that.

Now there's a lot more. How are the world reserves looking like over the long term, let's say over the next few decades, let's say the centuries? Is there any way to even calculate that right now? Do you know? Well, you know, I think we're going to have enough oil, but I think it's going to be more expensive. It's the big fines are kind of going away.

We're not running offshore as much as we should. We should be doing more. Exxon has a big project and Guy on, and they're finding a lot of oil down there, but there's less and less of it. I really think most engineers working the business will say, well, really, the next big revolution will be technological. Because you don't get all the oil out of the ground.

So it will be how do you, How do you extract more oil? And so I think we'll continue to innovate our way through it. But I do believe the oil business, it's really gotten super efficient. It wasn't at the beginning of shale. There's a lot of wasted capital. But it's gotten really, really good. And we can make money unless we can't make money at $50 oil, which is no way about it.

Yeah, I didn't think that would pencil. And that's why when I see it drifting down, I'm going, oh, this is not good for the oil patch. is what I was thinking. But bottom line, though, no, early on, though, like, how much energy does it take to produce a typical barrel of oil now, if you were to say a percentage of the energy in a barrel of, let's say, sweet crude, okay? Well, yeah. Well, to produce it in terms of energy, I mean, you know, there's an electrical cost,

there's trucking, but it's pretty low. And those typically, when you budget stuff out, those are called lease operating expenses. And, you know, some companies are as low as $10 a barrel, and some, you know, are 30 plus, depending, you know. You have it can be really, really expensive some of it. And you've got to dispose your wastewater. We don't dispose of it. We reuse it for fracking. We retain and reuse.

A lot of people are doing that. And there's ways to cut costs like that, but it's pretty expensive. And so it's, you know, what you'll see if oil starts getting down, of the 40s, you'll see people shutting their wells off. Yeah. Well, what I was getting at, though, is the actual return on investment of the energy, you know, the energy in versus the energy out, because, you know, when you used to stick the pipe in and you'd get a gusher, very little energy in, and then you get a lot of product.

Now, how does that work today, that kind of calculation? I just don't know if you, maybe you don't even know. Well, I have to figure it out. I guess the easiest metric would be how long it takes pro well to pay all of it, all the money invested, if that's kind of in the same wheelhouse. And generally, you hope that it's less than two years. Some people are less than a year. And then the fact is, oil wells go on to pump, you know, for 30, 40 plus years. So there's a long tail of unencumbered, you know, income. And, you know, your capex has been, you know, washed out. So, you know, but there's a lot more

energy produced than consumed. I don't know that. I'm sorry, but it's, you know, Mark, it's not like 1930s, you know, in that era, in the early part of it. But that's kind of what I was wondering, because, you know, to then, let's say, set up an oil derrick in the middle of the ocean with, you know, drilling down thousands of feet and, you know, that, it would seem to be you're using a lot more energy to get less and less energy as time goes on. And I was like wondering at what point does it not make sense, you know, any longer? Well, you know, you deal in oil business, just like real estate, there's a lot of capital, a lot of capital. And if you are using banks, you better make sure of pencils. You know, you better make sure because if it doesn't, you're not going to make it. So projects that are not deemed productive at a certain barrel of oil like Venezuela won't get funded because you won't make any money.

So speaking of which, do you think that the Venezuelan or the oil companies that were burned last time by the Chavez folks, do you think that in spite of President Trump's, you know, in pleading, hey, go back in here and make money, do you think they're going to be rushing back into Venezuela or not? How do you see it from the oil patches view? Well, I'll just quote Darren Woods, the CEO of Exxon, at that meeting a couple of Fridays ago at the White House, he said, and Venezuela is uninvestable. And, you know, the Trump administration has been really good to oil and gas. I mean, so we're talking about, yeah, they want prices low. I get it. That's for the consumer. And I feel the administration's hearts in the right place. You've got to take care of the consumer first.

But on the other hand, there's a balancing act, you know. So there's a lot of regulation off. But I think they want to see this Venezuelan thing work out. I love that we're doing something about drugs coming in. into our country. I absolutely love it. I've seen so much. I live in an area where there's a lot of fentanyl death. It's from close to home. Oh, yeah. And anything to stop it, anything to stop it. And so I love it. I love the Venezuelan drug stories. Shut them down. And I think we should do something about Colombia. And Mexico should get in line. And we've got to stop this because our kids,

we're losing, okay, real briefly, because this is not the subject matter, but we're losing more kids per year to fentanyl death than we lost in the entire Vietnam War. What are we doing? Why does it not get covered in the news? What is wrong with us? That we've almost accepted this. So I love that someone's doing something. But Venezuela remains kind of uninvestable until oil prices get high. So it's a double-edged sword. The Trump administration wants lower oil prices. But nobody wants to spend money, spending $100 billion or whatever it's going to take. That's a number floating around to get these fields back in good order. Nobody wants to spend that until there's better prices and more stability.

Dan, that's why I wanted to bring you on here to get it from the oil departments or the oil companies, the people who actually bring the derricks and the fracking and the pipes and the capital and everything else, all right? Interesting book, I want to get a copy of this one of Roughnecks and Riches, a startup in the Great American Fracking Boom. It's going to come out next month in February of this year. Dan Doyle, president of two American energy companies. And do you have a website for the book? Is it just up on Amazon or all the other usual suspects?

What's up? Yeah, you just go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Simon & Schuster, and you can order it on any of them. It comes out February 3rd, and hopefully people will read it, Bill. Yeah, well, I hope so, too. Now, in fact, learn about this very necessary industry. The takeaway, though, when it comes to Venezuela, long term, good, in the short term, don't look for it to move any of the energy prices, right?

That's the takeaway, what you're saying. That's, yes. Okay. All right. Dan, thanks so much for explaining what goes on here and sharing a lot of your colorful past, though, especially in the film and everything else, okay? You'd be well. Take care. Okay.

Thanks, Bill. Dan Doyle.