Entrepreneurial opportunities in fracking

Hydraulic fracturing is opening doors in the United States and overseas

Paul Driessen

McDonald Hopkins Energy Forum: How the shale boom is fueling employment

September 11, 2013

We share some deep passions about energy, economics and the environment.

Your passion is to innovate and create technologies and companies, to foster job and wealth creation, greater prosperity, better opportunities and living standards for more people, and continued environmental progress.

Mine is to help foster the political, legal, regulatory and economic environment that will allow your passions to flourish, your creative instincts to be unleashed, your talents to bear fruit.

I feel right at home here with you, because of that mutual passion – and because my son is also an entrepreneur. He launched his first business enterprise when he was twelve … and at age sixteen hired two guys over in Ukraine to help him design websites for corporate clients.

He’s still at it, working his Chicago job by day, building web-based business enterprises by night, and getting ready to marry a Westlake girl … which is why I also feel at home here in Cleveland.

But enough introductory small talk. Let’s get down to business.

Fracking in the new American economy

Why fracking? What the frack is going on here? This technology has been around for more than half a century. Why is it suddenly so “new,” so “innovative,” so “game-changing”? Three reasons.

One, hydraulic fracturing – also called HF or fracking – was first employed in Kansas in 1947. By 1968 more than a half million frack jobs had been performed. But in recent years George Mitchell, Harold Hamm and other entrepreneurs took it to a new level. They combined steadily improving fracking technology with vastly improved horizontal drilling capabilities, plus sophisticated computers, down-hole sensors and micro-seismic detection instruments. Now, two-dimensional and 3-D computer models let them plan and evaluate jobs, and keep improving.

The equipment lets crews send high-tech drill bits 6,000 feet down and 8,000 feet laterally into shale formations – and end up within three feet of their intended target!

Then they pump water, sand and small amounts of common household and other non-toxic chemicals down the holes, under super high pressure, to fracture the shale into millions of little pieces – thereby freeing up vast amounts of crude oil, natural gas and propane liquids that are trapped in the shale … and were previously inaccessible, unavailable to our energy-hungry civilization. (Go to www.FracFocus.org to see what chemicals are used in any well in the USA.)

Two, this technology and methodology have unlocked trillions of Btus … decades of new petroleum supplies … trillions of dollars in jobs, salaries, royalties and taxes … and vast supplies of cheap energy and petrochemical feed stocks, for homes, hospitals, schools, power plants, refineries and factories.

Fracking has turned world energy politics upside down, especially for OPEC and Russia. It has also eviscerated the Club of Rome and environmentalist mantra that we are rapidly exhausting the world’s petroleum supplies … and so must fundamentally transform our economies to run on rationed oil and mandated supplies of expensive, land-intensive, subsidized renewable energy.

In the process, fracking has become the key to manufacturing and economic revival, wealth creation, job generation and preservation, sustainable government revenues, and growing US energy independence.

Three, this could only have happened in America. Almost nowhere else on Earth does the entrepreneurial spirit run so deep, so far, so fast. Almost nowhere else could Mitchell and Hamm have found the money, expertise, and shared dogged determination to try and fail, over and over – and finally succeed.

As Thomas Edison said, Invention is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

Just as important, only in these United States of America could this private sector entrepreneurship forge a happy marriage with private land ownership. Almost everywhere else, the state owns the subsurface mineral estate – and the rights to any profits derived from developing those minerals.

That puts the state and land owners in perpetual conflict – a conflict that is playing out now with fracking in many other countries. Government ownership of subsurface oil, gas and other minerals has also created conflicts with fracking on western state public lands here in the USA … whereas East of the Rockies private lands abound, and landowners, energy companies, and state and local governments alike are all benefiting from HF operations.

Face it. It’s highly unlikely that this technology would have gotten to first base – much less have had the incredible impact it has – if our federal government had retained ownership of the subsurface minerals that this nation has been so blessed to have in such abundance.

Once again, we must pay tribute to the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. Among many other brilliant decisions, they tied the surface and subsurface estates together – giving farmers, ranchers, homeowners and communities rights to the subsurface energy and mineral estate, and profits arising from developing those valuable commodities.

Reflect on that a moment. How is it possible that, in a colony with barely 2.5 million people in 1776 – scarcely more than live in Greater Cleveland today – we could find such a brilliant group of constitutional innovators, with such an amazing grasp of human nature and Natural Law?

It certainly lends credence to John F. Kennedy’s quip that, amid a gathering of Nobel Prize Laureates, there had never before been a greater concentration of intellectual power in the White House – since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Mitchell and Hamm launched the fracking revolution. You are here today to ponder how you might take the fracking industry to the next level – or take advantage of the energy and economic riches it has unleashed, to take other new or existing business enterprises to the next level.

What opportunities are out there – right under your noses perhaps, or maybe hidden in the dense foliage? And how thoughtful, brilliant, creative and determined will you be in finding and developing them?

Before I offer some thoughts on that central topic, I want to underscore how vitally important it is for you to accept that challenge.

America in crisis

Our nation is clearly in crisis – economic, employment and spiritual. But it’s largely a crisis of our own making – a crisis created or worsened by the people we have elected to lead us, and the ones they have put in power to regulate us.

That means we have the power, the right and the obligation to do something about it. Obviously, it won’t be an easy job.

So meanwhile, to succeed in harnessing this fracking revolution, you will have to be more than savvy entrepreneurs. You will also have to help change our current system of stifling over-regulation and barely concealed contempt for business, wealth creation and especially resource extraction. OR you will have to find ways around that system, the way Mitchell and Hamm did by focusing on private lands.

You will also have to help educate and persuade landowners, neighbors, communities, legislators and regulators that hydraulic fracturing is not dangerous, and should not be controversial – despite claims by anti-fracking activists, who have their own passions, motives and agendas. More on that later.

Here’s the situation we face.

Since January 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency alone has promulgated more than 1,900 new regulations. Other federal agencies have promulgated thousands of additional rules, under Dodd-Frank, Obamacare and numerous other laws. The Competitive Enterprise Institute calculates that all these regulations are costing American businesses and families over $1.8 trillion a year.

On top of all that, we are spending tens of billions per year on renewable energy and other boondoggles, many of which still went bankrupt, despite all these taxpayer subsidies … which in many cases were accompanied by exemptions from endangered species and other regulations that other companies and industries are obligated to follow.

I think it was Mark Twain who said there is no distinctly native American criminal class – except Congress and the bureaucracy. You’ll get no disagreement from me on that.

I also think a Will Rogers story is relevant here. “I’ve been thinking about those German U-boats that are sinking our ships,” he reportedly said in 1917, “and I think I have a solution. You just make the ocean water so hot that the U-boat crews can’t stand it – and when the boats surface, you just pick ‘em off, one by one.

“Now, I know you admirals and engineers are gonna say, How the heck do we heat up the ocean? That’s not my problem. I just set the policy. You go figure out how to get the job done.”

Well, in our economic arena, we’ve got a federal government, and some state governments, that seem to have the same attitude. “We just set the policies,” they say. “You business types figure out how to create jobs, make a profit, keep your doors open, and increase prosperity … in the economic and regulatory ocean we’ve created.”

So how’s that attitude working out? Not very well, from my vantage point.

Most of the employment gains during this supposed “economic recovery” have been in government, and in temporary and part-time private sector jobs. Only 170,000 new jobs of all types were created last month. Meanwhile, 312,000 Americans stopped looking for work. As of September 2013, a record 90 million people – almost one-third of the entire US population – are not working and not even looking for a job

Over fourteen million working age Americans are still unemployed … are involuntarily working part-time below their potential and preference, for less pay than with their old jobs … or have simply given up looking for a job.

The Washington Post says incomes have fallen, poverty and homelessness have risen, full-time jobs are much harder to find, and inflation-adjusted median household incomes have dropped 4.4 percent in four years. That’s $2,200 out of a $50,000 annual income – a huge loss of buying power for middle class families.

Tens of millions of American adults are struggling with joblessness or lower paying part-time jobs, living near poverty – or relying on welfare, unemployment and disability payments for a least part of their family incomes.

That means a steadily declining quality of life for tens of millions of Americans. And when taxes and inflation are figured in, the Associated Press says, we are seeing the largest decline in real personal disposable incomes in fifty years.

On top of all that, our national debt has soared five trillion dollars in four years – and will climb another trillion dollars this year. That weighs heavily on our nation, our children, and our society’s ability to create jobs.

As former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan points out, joblessness is also a personal crisis, because work is a spiritual event … a way to serve your family and community, to be integrated into the daily life of our nation. Work gives us purpose, stability, shared mission, pride and stature.

Being unable to find or keep a job is catastrophic for human beings, she says. It erodes self-confidence – and going out to interview for jobs where a hundred people are competing for a single position is often a painful, debilitating exercise in futility. The impacts of joblessness on people’s health, welfare and psychological well-being can be devastating.

Anemic growth, fewer full-time jobs and declining economic status also mean millions of families cannot heat and cool their homes properly … pay their rent, mortgage or other bills … take vacations … or save for college and retirement.

The stress of being unemployed – or holding several low-paying part-time jobs – means poor nutrition … sleep deprivation … more miles of stressful, expensive commuting … and higher incidences of depression … and alcohol, drug, spousal and child abuse.

It means lower life expectancies and higher suicide rates. It means every life allegedly saved because of countless new laws and regulations is offset by lives lost because of those same rules. even worse, many of those costly regulations are based on ideology, science that is sloppy or worse, and meaningless computer models – which means they bring few or no health or environmental benefits in exchange for all these human costs.

The most fundamental principle of regulation – first, do no harm – is being ignored.

What a difference fracking has made

Incredibly, far too many politicians and regulators just don’t get it … and just don’t seem to care enough to do what needs to be done – namely, get rid of some of these burdensome, harmful, counterproductive, excessive regulations … and just get out of the way.

But the situation would be a lot worse, were it not for one part of our economy.

Thankfully, in the midst of this insane regulatory maelstrom, there is at least one brilliantly luminescent bright spot: America’s petroleum industry – especially its fracking sector.

In that regard, we need to keep a very important reality in the forefront. All wealth, all jobs, ultimately come from holes in the ground! All the energy, metals, other raw materials, food and timber that make our lives and living standards possible sprout from … or are extracted from … holes in the ground. Even fish come out of “holes” in Earth’s fresh and sea water.

Think about that when you read that the Energy Information Administration reported that – between January 2007 and December 2012 – total US private sector employment increased by barely 1 percent. We cannot live on government, IT and service sector jobs alone.

Thankfully, says the EIA, over the same five-year period, the oil and natural gas industry experienced a 40 percent increase in drilling, extraction and support jobs.

Over the past six years, according to IHS Global Insight, Citigroup and other analysts … hydraulic fracturing has created 1.7 million new direct and indirect jobs in oil fields, equipment manufacturing, legal and information technology services, and other sectors of the US economy. The total is likely to rise to three million or even 3.6 million jobs over the next seven years.

In the process, fracking has injected hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity at the national, state and local level – and added over $65 billion in lease bonuses, rents, royalties and taxes to federal and state treasuries. Government fracking revenue is expected to total at least $110 billion by 2020.

This year alone, IHS Global calculates, frack-based petroleum production could reduce America’s oil import bill by $75 billion – and save us $100 billion in imported liquefied natural gas.

The Fort Worth, Texas Chamber of Commerce says fracking created 110,000 direct and secondary jobs, generated $65 billion in economic activity, and added billions in property and sales tax revenues in the 24-county Dallas region since 2001.

Pennsylvania’s Labor and Industry Department reports that fracking has already generated 72,000 jobs and $1.4 billion in state tax revenues – and could bring another $20 billion by 2020.

When I visited field operations around Williamsport, Pennsylvania, two months ago, the Chamber of Commerce president told me the area is booming because of high-wage oilfield fracking jobs. Young people are coming back, instead of moving away, and many are taking college programs in oilfield technical and business specialties.

West Virginia and Louisiana have reported similar success. Ohio has enormous potential. And of course everyone has heard about the North Dakota miracle.

A beautiful young woman I know is working as a petroleum engineer and explosives expert (!) for Schlumberger – fracking, freezing and frolicking through frigid North Dakota winters, but making big bucks in the Bakken, during the biggest economic boom the state has ever seen:

·         Oil production has soared from 36 million barrels in 2005, to 237 million in 2012. Natural gas production has also skyrocketed.

·         Statewide unemployment stands at 3 percent, and businesses like McDonald’s are begging for workers … and paying signing bonuses and high salaries to attract and keep them.

·         There are 41,000 oil industry jobs … and 18,000 more jobs supporting the industry, just in North Dakota.

·         The state now has a billion-dollar budget surplus – and the oil production has injected over $34 billion into the state economy so far, with more to come.

·         The number of millionaires has skyrocketed from 266 in 2005 … to 634 in 2011 … in a state with 700,000 people.  

Overall, says IHS Global, by 2035 U.S. oil and natural gas operations could inject over $5 trillion in cumulative capital expenditures into our nation’s economy, while generating more than $2.5 trillion in cumulative additional government revenues.

But maybe most important of all, fracking has slashed average natural gas prices from a high of $8 per thousand cubic feet (or million Btus) in 2008 – and $15 per mcf on the spot market – to around  $3 today.

These bargain basement prices for plentiful, clean burning natural gas have slashed household heating and air conditioning bills … revived America’s petrochemical, steel and other manufacturing industries … and reinvigorated American ingenuity and economic competitiveness.

Colorado-based Mercator Energy succinctly explains how that huge price reduction has benefitted America. Families saved $32 billion in energy bills in 2012 alone. That’s almost ten times what the federal low income energy assistance program (LIHEAP) paid to our poorest families. Industrial and residential consumers combined saved almost $110 billion last year.

For poor and middle class households and blue collar job holders that are really struggling in the anemic part-time-work economy, this is huge.

It’s even bigger when you compare our $3 per mcf US prices to the $10 per mcf they’re paying in Spain and Belgium … $13 in China and India … and $15 per mcf in Brazil and Japan.

Steel plants, electric utilities and countless other industries are benefiting mightily from cheap shale gas and newly abundant supplies of domestic oil and propane liquids – both as energy sources and as feed stocks for fertilizer and petrochemical manufacturing.

For example, abundant, affordable gas from the Marcellus shale formation has persuaded Shell to plan a $2-billion ethane “cracking” plant near Pittsburgh – creating some 10,000 construction jobs and as many as 10,000 permanent jobs.

All these numbers truly astound me. And to think they’ve come about because of a couple of determined American inventors and entrepreneurs.

Mitchell, Hamm and their colleagues followed in the hallowed footsteps of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Boeing, Steve Jobs, Ohio’s own Charles Kettering, and other innovators who have had that uncanny ability to recognize unmet needs … and create equipment, products, services and entire industries that have revolutionized our economies, lives and living standards.

Seizing the opportunities

In razor sharp contrast to what is happening in North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas – our current national economic situation dramatizes why it’s so important that you seize the opportunities that hydraulic fracturing has created.

You clearly have Edison’s inspiration and perspiration. Your successes, and your membership in this association, also demonstrate that you share actor Ashton Kutcher’s philosophy that “success sounds a lot like hard work.” You are the antithesis of the negativism and pessimism we have seen too much of.

Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be innovators, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. You’d be at the Great Lakes Brewing Company, drowning your frustrations and sorrows in your Elliott Ness or Gilgamash beer. 

I firmly believe past is prelude. So I hope you will carefully size up this fracking race horse, mount that steed, and ride it to fame, fortune, and a better, stronger America and world.

Let me summarize some of the areas where hydraulic fracturing can play a huge, positive role. And not just in shale gas, oil and propane production.

There are literally thousands of places, companies and ways you can get involved.

·         Drilling, fracking and production plays, of course – but not just in shale. Mature fields, including those that were once thought to be nearing the end of their productive lives, can be reinvigorated and coaxed into yielding oil and gas for more decades to come … in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere.

·         Even fields as far away as Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope might be amenable to fracking technology, to enhance and prolong production in a variety of cases. BP, ARCO and other companies are already looking into that.

·         The “source rocks” that originally provided the oil and gas that pooled in the stratigraphic, salt dome, structural and other traps that companies have historically drilled into – these rocks could become important plays in the future, depending on exploration and drilling technologies and oil prices.

·         The small and mid-sized companies that are developing those plays are often looking for investors, improved extraction technologies … and ways to convert opponents into supporters.

·         Oilfield service companies, like Halliburton, McDermott, Schlumberger and dozens of others offer still more opportunities to invest and innovate.

·         Manufacturers that make the equipment, chemicals and other items that those companies need … can be found in literally every state of the union. Frack sand from Wisconsin and steel pipe making in Ohio are just two examples, among thousands.

·         Thousands of beneficiaries of these cheaper, reliable domestic hydrocarbons offer still more opportunities – including refineries, auto makers, electric utilities, and manufacturers of every size and description.

·         Petrochemical companies will also benefit. Ethylene and propylene will be expanding by 2015 … plastics and pharmaceuticals not long after that.

·         You might even want to support colleges, technical schools and programs that are training the next generations of oilfield, chemical, engineering and other experts – or groups like mine that are working hard to educate people about fracking … and challenge disinformation campaigns that are being waged against this game-changing technology.

Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz says President Obama now supports fracking. That’s a hugely positive development, because EPA and the Energy and Interior Departments could easily try to do to fracking what they’ve already done to coal … and to onshore and offshore drilling.

Apparently, the President has been persuaded that fracking is environmentally safe – and will have positive effects on jobs, government revenues … and carbon dioxide emissions that he still blames for supposed “dangerous manmade global warming and climate change.” 

So there should be some happy hunting all across these United States of America. BUT don’t stop at our water’s edge. There are countless opportunities in the global arena, as well.

Fracking opportunities overseas

Those countries I just mentioned … where natural gas prices are still in the stratosphere … really need abundant, reliable, affordable energy, to lift billions of people out of abject poverty – and a lot of them have huge shale deposits, waiting to be tapped.

A lot of European countries also really need cheap energy, because their relentless pursuit of a “green, renewable future” has killed millions of jobs and sent millions of families into “fuel poverty” (spending more than 10% of their incomes on energy).

But on the bright side, Estonia has just become the world’s first country to meet all of its power needs from shale, with enough left over to sell natural gas to its neighbors. The Baltic Tiger’s economy will get a hefty boost from cheap energy over the coming years.

Great Britain, Israel, Poland, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Spain have given initial green lights to shale drilling and fracking.

Argentina has made shale oil and gas development a high priority and could become the first Latin American country to frack. Brazil could be close behind. Chile could become a happy customer.

China has huge deposits … but needs better technology, expertise and geological data to tap them.

India and South Africa also have big deposits – and obvious needs for hydrocarbon energy. So do many other countries. And don’t forget Australia and Canada.

These energy bounties could help enhance and safeguard the lives of billions of people. Those countries that act on facts and common sense … want to ensure better lives for their people – and are willing to ignore anti-fracking pressure groups – will do well … and could be great places for you to get involved.

Everything I just said about needs and opportunities in the United States applies overseas – with the obvious caveat that the politics and policies of each country must be assessed very carefully … just as you unfortunately have to do more and more right here, in the once much more free market USA.

Many of these countries have their own modern drilling companies, oilfield service companies, chemical and equipment manufacturers, and so on. But many do not – and have to import the materials and expertise they need. So do your homework and pursue the opportunities that each one offers.

In the process, you might also explore ways that you can help change land ownership rules – or at least help countries find creative ways to give surface owners employment, financial and other reasons … why they should want to support fracking in their countries and communities … why they should want to become advocates for shale development, instead of opponents of it.

Anti-fracking campaigns

To be brutally honest, I really cannot understand why fracking should be “controversial” –  or why environmental groups, Hollywood millionaires and well-off urban activists would oppose it so vigorously … and be so willing to use half-truths, wild exaggerations and outright lies, to block it, all over the world. What the frack is wrong with these people?

This is not the same environmental movement that my friend Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and I belonged to decades ago. It’s become a multi-billion-dollar business … with agendas and tactics that I cannot possibly characterize as ethical, socially responsible, compassionate about the poor and unemployed, or even protective of wildlife and ecological values.

In my humble opinion, even if you take the wild, unproven claims at face value, fracking is far less environmentally harmful than wind power – based on land use, raw materials, and unsustainable bird and bat mortalities – and wind turbines cannot exist without natural gas.

Yes, there are a lot of scary stories about earthquakes, contaminated groundwater and burning tap water. But there is no evidence to support the horror stories, no actual examples with proven links to fracking. Not even the Environmental Protection Agency has been able to find any.

Those “earthquakes” supposedly caused by fracking are actually micro-seismic events that measure around 0.8 on the Richter Scale – about what is caused by a car passing by your house. Even loaded dump trucks register only a 3 on the Richter.

And yes, you can ignite methane at your kitchen faucet, if your well was drilled through gas-bearing rock formations and was not properly cemented and sealed to keep gas out. But fracturing zones are thousands of feet below groundwater supplies, and production wells use cement and steel casing that extends hundreds of feet below the surface. No groundwater has ever been contaminated by fracking – in some two million wells that have been fracked to date.

Fracking could bring new jobs and revenues to chronically depressed areas in the New York, for example, save hundreds of family farms, and ease the red-ink woes in Albany and the Big Apple. But Governor Cuomo will not approve fracking, until he is “absolutely sure” it will cause no health or environmental problems.

He has let companies build huge wind turbines in upstate communities that are worried about hawks and eagles being killed, property values going down, and people’s health being harmed by turbine blade “light flicker” and subsonic turbine noise. But even when families strongly support it, and even though fracking opponents cannot back up their claims with any actual evidence, Mr. Cuomo won’t move forward on hydraulic fracturing.

So how do you explain why Mr. Cuomo and “progressive” outfits like Food and Water Watch and the Sierra Club continue to rail against this safe, proven, beneficial technology?

Follow the money – and the ideology.

As I said, Big Green is Big Business. Its guiding principle is opposition to hydrocarbons, economic growth, and even efforts to turn the world’s diseased and impoverished billions into healthy middle-class consumers and entrepreneurs.

It is loud, well organized, well funded, and highly skilled in public relations and fear mongering. It seeks ever more power and ever greater control over our lives – but with no accountability for the mistakes it makes, the falsehoods it tells, or the damage it inflicts on people, jobs or the environment.

As former National Audubon Society COO Dan Beard once admitted, “What you get in your mailbox is a never-ending stream of crisis-related shrill material designed to evoke emotions, so you will sit down and write a check” … or click the “Donate Now” button.

The Aggressive Environmentalism industry would collapse without its 31 Flavors “crisis of the month” campaigns – and help from news outlets, politicians, regulators and wealthy liberal foundations.

Deep Ecology adherents view fossil fuels as evil incarnate. They believe fervently in “peak oil” and Climate Armageddon. They are incredibly frustrated that fracking guarantees a hydrocarbon renaissance, and an energy predominance for decades to come.

They also tend to be well-off, and clueless about the true sources of modern living standards. They think electricity comes from wall sockets, and food from grocery stores.

They have disturbingly callous attitudes about people who have lost their jobs – and about poor rural Empire State families that are barely hanging onto their farms, unable to tap the Marcellus Shale riches beneath their land, because Governor Cuomo won’t lift his moratorium on fracking.

Many don’t even give a spotted owl hoot about the world’s impoverished billions, whose hope for better lives depends on the plentiful, dependable, affordable fuels and electricity that conventional petroleum and “frack gas” can help bring.

But these activists are a minority. As the great Irish statesman Edmund Burke observed: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers make the field ring with their importunate chink … pray do not imagine that they are the only inhabitants of the field … or that they are other than little, shriveled, meager, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.”

So get to work. Find and seize the incredible opportunities that hydraulic fracturing has made possible. And gird your loins for battles with anti-fracking ideologues – knowing you are on the side of humanity, social responsibility, true sustainability, and real environmental progress.

Knowing too that – no matter how hard eco-activists campaign against it – they cannot put the fracking genie back in the bottle. America and the world have awakened to its potential – and to the critical need for this technology.

So continue to be investors, innovators and entrepreneurs. And become community organizers and persuaders, to counter the protests and false advertising of anti-fracking campaigners – and the bad policies and rules imposed by ill-advised politicians and regulators.

I’m here to do whatever I can to help inform, educate and pave the way.

Together, we can continue making the world a better place.

Thank you.

Editor's Note:  Since Paul gave this presentation here in Cleveland I was priviledged to be invited and after years of e-mail's and some phone conversations, I had the pleasure to meet and have lunch with him and his son's future father-in-law.