Billie Eilish is the youngest person ever to win multiple Oscars. The first was for the theme song to the James Bond movie “No Time to Die” in 2022, and the second was this year for the song “What Was I Made For?” from the “Barbie” soundtrack. She has a caseload of Grammys to her name, which means she’s halfway to the EGOT (an EGOT is someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award, one of the most impressive feats one can achieve in the performing arts). Yet only one of her songs has ever climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The song? “Bad Guy.”
The track takes the point of view of someone who sees through the phony toughness of some chump who’s never named and playfully asserts her own bona fides in her ability to ruin this guy’s life. Her tone never changes, her register never rises, and her confidence feels unshakeable. The chorus, such as it is, is punctuated by a petulant “Duh,” which I learned in reading about this song, was chosen from 34 different takes of that one word. It’s a great song, and indicative of Billie Eilish’s unique style and superlative talent.
I thought about Billie Eilish and “Bad Guy” for a couple of reasons. The first is that over the last several months, we have had a multitude of events where I’ve gotten to engage with our member companies and their employees, not just professionally but on a personal level as well. I’m particularly struck by the young talent entering the oil and gas industry, which bodes well for our future. Oil and gas is perpetually reinventing itself, which you can see any time you visit a drill pad or a frac site.
If you had a time machine and could talk with engineers 20 years ago about how many wells you can drill from one location, how much quicker each well can be drilled, the fact that those wells are all horizontal, and the lengths of the laterals that are now so common as to be unremarkable, the jaws of those engineers would likely hit the floor. But it’s a lot like what you hear from athletes about breakthroughs — once someone finally smashes a barrier, others inevitably follow.
In 1954, Roger Bannister ran a sub-four-minute mile, a feat many thought impossible. A man named John Landy then ran faster than that six and a half weeks later. In 1999, Tony Hawk landed the first-ever 900 (two and a half rotations) in competition in half pipe skateboarding. Now, a dozen people claim that accomplishment, and a skater named Gui Khury has even added a half rotation to the record by landing a 1080 in 2020. What further breakthroughs await in the world of running or skateboarding? Billie Eilish is 23 years old. What new songs will she create? How will she continue to change the landscape of pop music? What will our young oil and gas engineers, geologists and other professionals come up with as they continue their professional journey?
As for “Bad Guy,” sometimes I’m superstitious even mentioning this, but does it feel to anyone else like the cultural tide is turning just a little bit? Oil and gas has always been a useful punching bag and ad hoc villain for (notably) the “keep it in the ground” folks and a subset of elected officials. But after years of demonization and attempts at a forced energy transition, it seems that more and more everyday Americans are waking up to the benefits of a healthy and prosperous domestic oil and gas industry.
We can look at Europe, which has pivoted from being reliant on Russian products to heat their homes and fuel their cars, to American LNG. We can look at the protection of consumer choice in things like gas stoves and the types of vehicles Americans want to drive. And we can see the positive impacts here in our own community with events like our annual food drive, our involvement in STEMFest and our immense contributions to Utah’s economy in terms of jobs, wages and tax revenues. Some in our society tried to force the issue and phase out fossil fuels entirely. We collectively got a taste of that and realized just how impractical and ill-advised such a transition was.
Maybe oil and gas isn’t the bad guy it’s been made out to be.
To quote Billie Eilish one last time: “Duh.” =)
Enjoy the issue.
