Word: petroleum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prince of the Panhandle. T. Boone Pickens has few regrets about his raiding career. "Our motives were sincere," says the Amarillo, Texas, oilman. "We believed we could run those companies better than they were being run." Pickens, 61, never managed to acquire such energy giants as Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Unocal, all of which he attacked in the mid-'80s. Yet he enriched himself by acquiring stock in the companies and then selling the shares at a profit, making nearly $400 million on his Gulf raid alone...
...Koito Manufacturing, a Tokyo auto-parts maker in which he controls a 20% share. Pickens says Koito has hired Wall Street consultants to advise the company on how to keep him at bay. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia last August reinstated a class-action suit that Phillips Petroleum shareholders brought against Pickens in 1984. The plaintiffs claim that the value of their stock collapsed when Pickens abruptly abandoned his Phillips takeover...
Danger is a constant companion of workers in the petrochemical industry. But no one could be prepared for the explosions and the fireball that last week reduced a Phillips Petroleum Co. plastics plant near Houston to a blackened maze. "It was like being inside a bomb," said purchasing agent Clay Howell, who was knocked out of his chair 350 yds. from the blasts. Trying to stop the inferno was "like spitting in the ocean," said Houston fireman Joseph Phillips. Twenty-two employees were either killed or presumed dead...
When Exxon reckoned in July that it would spend nearly $1.3 billion to clean up its Alaskan oil spill, liability lawyers knew that was just the beginning. In Anchorage last week the state of Alaska filed a civil suit against the petroleum giant and the owners of the trans-Alaska pipeline, seeking unspecified damages that could total billions of dollars. Alaska charges the oil companies with deceiving the public about the safety of the shipping operation and with incompetence in the cleanup...
...NOTES by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence; $16.95). There is no better conversation than good shop talk; here a petroleum geologist ("I know how to find oil") tells many of the tricks of his trade and proves, in the process, that he also knows how to write...