There’s hardly any oil and gas production in a 40-mile radius of Houston,” says Mayor Bill White, a former energy executive, as he held court in the city’s charming Art Deco city hall. (Think of a much smaller Rockefeller Center but without the tourists.) “It’s the knowledge that has concentrated here that is driving things.” In 1981, the oil and gas industry was a domestic, blue-collar one. Today it’s an international, white-collar one. Oil companies, wind-energy startups, consulting geologists, and software developers comprise what John Hofmeister, who is retiring in July as president of Shell Oil Co., calls “this mass aggregation of people who know what they’re doing in the energy world.
Comments (View)