Pinedale Offline
Pinedale, Wyoming 

Feds announce plan to nationalize Oil and Natural Gas companies
New plan would redirect superfluous wealth to needy federal departments

The federal government today announced plans to take over the major oil and natural gas companies in the United States and operate oil and gas drilling under federal management.

Under the current system, the federal government auctions off lease rights to private companies to do the drilling and mineral recovery processing. Those private companies each create the infrastructure to get the resource out to the market and sell to whomever they choose. These companies pay taxes to the various levels of government on their operations and on the minerals at several stages as it is processed.

Under the new plan, the entire process of drilling, processing and sales would be operated by the federal government to more rigidly control the compliance with federal standards for operations conducted on federal land.

“Some of these companies make hundreds of billions of dollars profit a year,” said Al Kazeltzer, head of the new “Business Oversight, Absorption & Restructuring” office (BOAR). “By doing it ourselves, and doing it right, we can make that profit work for the U.S. government and help fund the billions of dollars of new programs we are putting in place with the new administration,” Kazeltzer said

“We’ll considerably reduce the red tape and squabbles over leasing for minerals on federal lands. Instead of having to deal with multiple companies that all do things differently, we’ll be in control over the entire process.” Kazeltzer said.

Part of the BOAR plan is aimed at quieting the public outrage and uproar over what is perceived to be evil big businesses that show obscenely large profits. “Successful businesses that earn huge profits make the federal deficit and government’s inability to balance its own books look really bad,” Kazeltzer said.

“No one company or person needs to be that rich,” he said. “The government believes we can redirect a lot of that superfluous wealth to needy federal departments to equalize the funding ratios for the public benefit.”

“The natural gas and oil industries are of importance to our country’s security and economics,” Kazeltzer said. “By nationalizing them, we can have better control over the market so we don’t see the huge jumps in gas prices at the pump each summer during tourist season,” he said. “We want to redirect the public mineral revenues to strengthen the federal coffers so we can employ American workers instead of having that wealth go to bloated private companies that spend so much of their resources overseas hiring cheaper foreign labor.”

The plan calls for terminating all federal oil and gas leases within 13 months and have BOAR create a new drilling department under the Bureau of Land Management to oversee all federal mineral drilling and operational management.

Big oil and gas companies that work in the Pinedale Anticline, Jonah Field and LaBarge areas would be merged into one and put under federal control with the new program. The Pinedale Anticline and Jonah are two of the largest natural gas fields in the United States, undergoing massive development activities. “With 80% of Sublette County already public land, we don’t see a significant impact on Pinedale above and beyond what the area has already experienced,” Kazeltzer said. “The shift would result in more stable employment and high-paying government jobs for the local economy,” he said.

When asked for comment, a high-ranking company representative out of Houston, who asked to not be identified, replied, “Frankly, we’ve seen the handwriting on the wall on this one for weeks. First the government took over the banks, then the auto industry. We’ve been joking about who is going to get “BOAR”ed next. They have to find a way to pay for the billions of dollars they are spending now, and we’re the only industry left that has that kind of profit. Frankly, we couldn’t be more thrilled.”

The anonymous industry representative continued, “We’re all tired of fighting the environmentalists who think we’re raping and pillaging the land, and the government that keeps changing the rules we’re supposed to operate by every couple of months,” he said. “The government doesn’t know how to run something like this. We’ll all get re-hired under cushy government jobs to do the same thing we’re doing now and we won’t have to worry anymore about the company whining about working efficiently, saving money, or fussing over air quality regulations. The feds can change to rules whenever they need to make the regulations fit so they can do things the way they want. The government will retain all the profit and put it directly into the Treasury, so there won’t be a middle man step that raises prices on the taxpayer. We’ll be the heroes that bail out the Social Security, Welfare and the health care financial crises. It will be a lot less stressful working for the government.”

Wind Farm coming to Sublette County
Recovering energy twice from the land

The American public will soon get twice the bang for their buck extracting energy from the Pinedale Mesa and Jonah Field.

The latest government plan to maximize benefit from the land involves taking advantage of "green" wind energy, something very plentiful in Wyoming, to generate more electricity to meet consumer demand in the Rocky Mountain West. Part of the project will interspace windmill turbines between natural gas wells on federal public land already dedicated to energy production in Sublette County.

High-voltage powerlines are already being constructed into the area to service the natural gas industry. These powerlines will be used as part of the electrical power grid servicing the wind farm.

Each of the towers stands 300 feet tall with three 130 foot long blades. As many as 2,000 wind turbines are expected to be interspaced between the natural gas wells in the developed fields, with another 8000 turbines on desert land between US 191 and US 189 from Pinedale south to the Interstate 80 corridor near Rock Springs.

"It will be very economical. There's a lot of open space out there that is being under-utilized. We already have many of the roads in place and the power transmission lines are coming. The turbines aren't much different from drilling rigs in terms of visual impact, and people are already pretty used to those. We'll be taking advantage of a resource that is plentiful in Wyoming," said a government spokesperson.