Okhlahoma City – Rigs & Rodeos (2009)
When you’re working in the petroleum industry, you will, willy nilly, find yourself in Texas, Okhlahoma City, Rotterdam, Tehran, Beijing and Singapore, at some point in your career. If you’re a man, you’d probably land up in Riyadh and Ras Tanura on the Red Sea as well. I was fortunate to visit Asaloyeh, a gas island in Iran’s South Pars.
Okhlahoma is America’s gas city. They used to drill for gas some two hundred years ago and haven’t looked back hence. Its countryside is peppered with gas rigs as far as eyes can see. Once the enabler of middle America’s prosperity, the gas rigs are now its bane in some sense. Because of drilling for shale, there are minor earthquakes as many as 18 in a month and the residents are fed up.
But Okhlahoma is also a frontier town of sorts, a cowboy country with huge stockyards and ranches. Take your pick of cowboy hats and whips and gorge on beef here.