The Startup & Small Producer Sectors

 Small producers once thrived, seeking prosperity and profit, but were ultimately overcome by market forces. Today, consolidated producers strategically relocate their head offices, confident in their ability to transition staff. Beyond a select few dynamic, innovative, accountable, and profitable independent producers, the remaining mid-sized producers are positioning themselves as attractive acquisition targets. This is the current state of the North American oil & gas industry. People, Ideas & Objects provides all North American producers with software and services through our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas. Much as everyone accesses the cloud or Artificial Intelligence. 

Society is now recognizing that the consequences of a climate-centric approach—such as freezing or starving—outweigh the perceived environmental nightmare. The industry cannot use the public's past belief that oil & gas was unnecessary as an excuse for failing to provide essential resources. Producers must proactively educate the public about the future, emphasizing that oil & gas will be significantly more expensive in the short term, with no immediate solutions. There is a need to explain why a bottle of water is less valuable than an equivalent volume of gasoline, and why gas is heavily taxed yet still less than half the price. Consumers, often unaware of the volume of their oil & gas consumption, have mistakenly believed that a few solar panels could suffice. The oil & gas industry has failed in effectively marketing its products.

Our current argument highlights the necessity of a robust startup and small producer sector within North American oil & gas. Consolidated producers, like Exxon's Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil, plan to move staff to their Edmonton refinery by 2028, initiating the next phase of their consolidation strategy. In Calgary, this contributes to a "giant sucking sound," which I view as a significant opportunity for industry renewal. Exxon describes this as a global approach, using offshoring to supplement staffing needs, a strategy mirrored by Chevron, Shell, BP, and others.
I recommend two papers published on January 20, 2025, for those affected. The first, 

Reconstructing Oil & Gas: 

Enabling Engineers and Geologists 

to be This Century’s Pioneers and 

Lead the Industry’s Future

Targets engineers and geologists who may find prosperity in the oil & gas startup small producer sectors. The second paper, 

Catalysts for Cultural Change:

The Leadership Role of 

People, Ideas & Objects 

User Community 

Is for those interested in our user community and service provider organizations.

These papers address how startup and small producers, as with all sectors of the industry, can be established, survive, and thrive to become the prosperous and profitable entities they should be. I want to emphasize three key points: our decentralized production model to obtain production discipline, overhead management, and these producers' two revenue streams. 

The Decentralized Production Model

A fundamental principle for the industry is that the cost of oil & gas production equals the replacement cost of each barrel produced. The incremental effort for each barrel reflects the increasing difficulty of finding and producing oil. With the Preliminary Specification providing detailed, actual, objective, and standardized reporting at each Joint Operating Committee, producers will understand the profit or loss point for each property. If a property's price exceeds its cost, production continues. If it reports a loss, it is shut-in to gain the following benefits:

• Maximized Profitability: Producers maximize profits by eliminating losses from unprofitable properties.

• Strategic Reserve Management: Holding reserves until production is profitable avoids incurring any incremental costs associated with losses.

• Cost Reduction: Keeping oil & gas as reserves reduces production and storage costs tied to excess, unprofitable output.

• Market Stability: Removing unprofitable production allows commodity markets to determine the marginal cost, establishing fair prices for all production. 

• Reserves Valuations: Market prices accurately reflect the value of petroleum reserves, and expand proven recoverable reserves to fulfill fiduciary duties.

• Innovation Opportunities: While properties are shut in, producers can explore innovative ways to increase production, reduce costs, or expand reserves to restore profitability and return the property back to production. 

• Replacement Value: Market prices must reflect current exploration and development costs, representing the true cost of energy produced today.

• Production Discipline: Profitability is the only fair and reasonable criterion for production discipline.

• Innovation as a Foundation: Higher commodity prices finance greater innovation, providing financial resources for future industry challenges.

The Preliminary Specification's service providers will offer standard and objective accounting and process management methods across North America. This ensures that any producer identifying an unprofitable property will recognize that shutting it in is the most effective and profitable solution, based on industry-wide assessments. That to do so is based on the same standard and objective criteria used across North America. This is not Exxon’s or Chevron’s system reconfigured for the industry. Production discipline will be instilled by maintaining and increasing reserve value and maximizing profits through producing only profitable properties.

Overhead

People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and service providers, aggressively tackle overhead costs, similar to a locust invasion on a fall crop, leading to significant reductions in a producer's overhead.

Firstly, the establishment of Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas software and services centralizes accounting and administrative costs across the industry. Just as cloud computing reduces computing costs, People, Ideas & Objects extends this paradigm to administration and accounting. Through the sharing of this infrastructure's costs across each barrel of oil equivalent produced, through hyper-specialization, advanced division of labor, and eventually automation and Artificial Intelligence, the quality and productivity of these resources will continuously improve. While the exact percentage of cost reduction cannot be estimated, it is expected to be substantial.

By directly charging overhead costs to the Joint Operating Committee, the burden is further reduced. Instead of capitalizing these costs on the balance sheet for decades, they are incurred as a current cost that is recouped in the current month. This means overhead is either not incurred if the property is shut in, or it is priced into the commodity, returning the cash as proceeds from the commodity sale and establishing a cash float for the producer's overhead.

Two Revenue Streams

In the past, small producers faced the burden of an incremental free cash flow requirement of $3-5 million per year to maintain a public listing. This distorted their performance and shifted their competitive advantage from technical skills to their connections on Wall Street, making lawyers or brokers as CEOs not uncommon.

People, Ideas & Objects believes that a producer firm's only competitive advantages will be its engineering & geological expertise and its land & asset base. Due to retirements and a lack of new entrants, there will be shortages of these resources. People, Ideas & Objects has addressed this issue through various methods documented in the Preliminary Specification.

For small producers, this means an opportunity to establish a second revenue stream based on their technical skills. This will enable them to sustain themselves longer without external capital, as these revenues and significantly lower startup costs can sustain them to become more established.

It is also timely to mention our paper, written on April  7, 2025.

Oil & gas Arbitrage: 

The Market Finds a Way

How small producers approach the industry, with or without Arbitrage investors, remains unknown and undefined. They will not be solely "drill and produce" operations but will employ new, dynamic, and innovative business models. The creativity in how producers function and achieve profitability is limitless. Rebuilding the industry on a culture of reserves preservation, performance, and profitability is a blank slate. When the Preliminary Specification becomes available through Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas, industry will be based on the technical aspects of applied engineering and geology, forming the foundation for these startup and small producers—an attractive, compelling, and intriguing approach to oil & gas that is much needed.

Podcast #31, Work & Job Order

 Today's podcast effectively promotes the Preliminary Specifications Work and Job Orders, which are managed through the Business Operations Management module. While the podcast correctly states that the module is used at a high level within the firm, it also accurately notes its application wherever necessary, particularly within the Joint Operating Committee.

The twelve-and-a-half minutes invested in this podcast offer exceptional value. It provides oil and gas professionals with a quick understanding of the podcast's content, encouraging further engagement with People, Ideas & Objects, our user community, and their service provider organizations.

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Timely Solutions, Part VII

 On the final day of the quarter, the accountability and responsibility of producer officers and directors are once again under scrutiny. Whether they were obligated to report their share of the $4.7 trillion in natural gas revenue losses over the past sixteen years is irrelevant. They dismiss it with their usual "muddle through" excuse. The fact that these officers and directors witnessed natural gas prices plummet from a 6:1 to a 50:1 ratio during that period should have prompted them to declare "not on my watch." Perhaps they never noticed the price changes, or they were content with them. They have ignored investor concerns for over a decade, and clearly, no one seems to care!

It's possible we're discussing issues beyond their comprehension. They still don't fully grasp the concept of "free on board." Perhaps they believe they have ample time to act in the coming months, unaware that action is required by September 30, 2025, not just a report on what they might say months from now. Maybe I intentionally withheld this detail, preferring to see them fail spectacularly.

Just another typical day in the oil and gas industry, where everything seems possible, yet absolutely nothing ever gets accomplished.

Podcast # 30, Our User Community and Service Providers

I'm truly pleased with this podcast! The content and presentation are excellent, and the material is a real pleasure to listen to. There are a few minor hiccups here and there, but they're absolutely negligible and don't detract from the experience at all. 🤓

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Timely Solutions, Part VI

 It’s highly inappropriate and somewhat unreasonable to criticize an industry's leadership for their performance over the past decades. People, Ideas & Objects have squarely placed the blame for the industry's difficulties on the producers, officers, and directors. Time will assess People, Ideas & Objects' methods, which appear to be either outright lunacy or rare and exceptional practicality.

If the lunacy should happen to fall to the officers and directors, it is rare and exceptional when individual investors consider a corporation’s investments no longer viable and decide that walking away is their best choice. However, that is not the case in North American oil and gas. The rare and exceptional element of the oil and gas producers is that the industry has been deemed unworthy of continued support.

Investors remain as shareholders to capture some of their investments through dividends. Liquidation of their positions is generally considered untenable due to their size. They expect to realize some value and gain some financial advantage over time if management is successful in rehabilitating their organization.

This level of action exercised against an industry on a wholesale basis is evidently a non-event. When investors signaled their discontent over a decade ago, that’s just history. But not a single producer firm did anything about it? The following question becomes the determinant as to the lunacy label: Which is worse, the investors' signal in 2015, or the subsequent decade of “muddle through.” Readers' choice, as I’d be biased in my answer.

Profits

The lack of “real” profitability is more or less the investors' issue. Profitability is at the heart of the steady decline of the industry's activities, financial liquidity, capacities, and capabilities. Unwilling to limit the damages to themselves, producers made sure to draw in the service industry and take them down harder and faster, betraying them and extinguishing any trust, faith, or goodwill they had in the producers. If anyone needs to understand why profits are so necessary in the industry, they can return to this point in time and realize this is what it’s like without them.

EIA, IEA, and OPEC are all in general disagreement as to the speed and severity of both conventional and shale-based volumetric declines over the next few years. Mark me surprised as they say it’s conventional and global in nature. I’ve always assumed it’s just North American shale volumes that were at risk, making it a continental issue that could be focused and driven. Now, as much as the “muddle through” crowd would like to think investors will rush back in (they weren’t), they’ll rush in elsewhere.

Producers have proven they don’t understand business to the level necessary to be profitable. They are stubbornly persistent about their lack of understanding and are unwilling to accept it and change. Absolutely nothing has happened or will happen until the investors show up at the party and start throwing cash around again.

September 30, 2025 Reporting

I am not aware of any reporting by producers about their need to inform investors of their impact from lost natural gas revenues since at least 2009. Their interpretation of the issue is unknown, and I find it odd their only action involves ghost banning my X account. They may be far smarter than the rest of us; after all, who would have thought we’d be here in 2025 with the industry in this condition?

Podcast # 29 Stablecoins and Crypto

 Following the release of our paper on Thursday, September 18, 2025, titled “President Trump’s Vision & Economic Developments in Oil & Gas,” our 29th podcast examines the transformative impact of stablecoin and cryptocurrency legislation on the U.S. financial system. This evolution shifts the framework from a post-World War II model to one optimized for the Internet age.

Minor inaccuracies persist in the presenter’s remarks, though they are sufficiently subtle that they may have escaped general notice. Providing detailed guidance on the podcast’s presentation often results in a departure from established formats and familiar elements.

Both the paper and the podcast address three critical components of the Preliminary Specification for the future of the oil and gas industry. Stablecoins and cryptocurrencies require the Joint Operating Committee to serve as the primary organizational structure, enabling producers and the sector as a whole to realize their full benefits. Asset tokenization or securitization becomes viable only when investors receive timely and accurate accounting information regarding the oil and gas assets in which they hold interests. The Preliminary Specification is uniquely equipped and designed to deliver this level of detailed, granular reporting.

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Timely Solutions, Part V

 Let's do some "what if" scenarios.

What if producers take no action before September 30, 2025, regarding past revenue losses?

• What kind of reporting are we talking about?

• Natural gas price structures have significantly declined since 2009.

• North American natural gas revenues were not realized.

• Solutions were available.

• They failed to acknowledge investor concerns about profitability and accountability from 2015.

• Officers and directors have failed, and continue to fail, to maximize the firm's assets.

What if no steps are taken to lessen the damage and resolve these issues?

• Reporting is just one step; what else have producers done?

• Investors have expected action since 2015.

• Will simply saying they have it under control or "muddling through" be enough this time?

• Will superficial attempts be made again, or have investors lost patience?

• Will investors expect officers and directors to make personal sacrifices and proceed with the Preliminary Specification?

How will producers address their revenue shortfalls?

• Are they anticipating extreme commodity price responses due to shale-based decline curves in oil and gas creating shortages?

• After recent layoffs and the rejection of the Trump Administration's "drill baby drill" policy, how will consumers react to higher prices?

• Are investors content to leave any potential windfalls in the hands of these officers and directors? What vision drives the industry today?

• How prepared is the industry for tomorrow's challenges? If a structural rebuild is necessary, why rebuild what has already failed?

What are the reporting requirements for September 30, 2025? Can officers and directors disregard these?

• In People, Ideas & Objects' opinion, informing shareholders about revenue losses will be mandatory. This was our conclusion in late 2023 when we first raised the issue of the industry's $4.7 trillion losses.

• However, there was silence. After President Biden halted the licensing of new LNG facilities, nothing further was said beyond what People, Ideas & Objects were stating. This made us appear foolish, selling a solution to a nonexistent, exaggerated issue.

• In August 2025, Shell vs. Venture Global was decided in arbitration in Venture Global's favor. If these significant gas revenue losses were a non-issue, why was Shell litigating?

• This was an admission that producer revenues, which they chose to ignore, were being captured by other market players.

• This invokes the SEC reporting requirements for those losses, which now involve the September 30, 2025, quarterly reports.

What if shareholders perceive the past 22 months as another betrayal by the producers? This includes ignoring the facts of revenue losses, if not concealing them by isolating People, Ideas & Objects' dissenting message. Since August 13, 2025, producers have also effectively "ghost banned" People, Ideas & Objects on the X platform.

Without clear action that can be reported before September 30, 2025, will reporting any action after that deadline be sufficient? 

I see no industry action, and no contact has been made with People, Ideas & Objects. Same old, same old, officers and directors have never been more comfortable. 

President Donald Trump’s Vision & Economic Developments in Oil & Gas

 I am pleased to provide our seventh research paper of 2025. This paper documents the overall legislative and policy initiatives, and proposals of President Donald Trump‘s administration. Taking these from the point of view of the impact on US oil and gas producers, as seen through People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification. 

Our paper. 

Timely Solutions, Part IV

 Throughout the years, People, Ideas & Objects has maintained that North American oil and gas producers have not achieved genuine profitability since the mid-1980s. This stems from a pattern of overcapitalizing property, plant, and equipment, which has ensnared producer firms in prioritizing balance sheet expansion, inefficient capital allocation, and similar imprudent practices. Consequently, this has generated inflated reported profits, prompting excessive investor commitments that resulted in overbuilt capacity and overproduction of commodities governed by price-maker economics. Such dynamics have sustained industry-wide commodity prices below marginal costs for decades.

Over the past four decades, these factors have precipitated a significant erosion in the competitive framework of North American producers. This gradual value destruction was initially obscured, encouraging investors—drawn by the apparent profitability—to persist with their funding. By 2015, however, investors recognized the underlying issues and ceased further investments, thereby revealing the extent of the value erosion. This deterioration has persisted, exacerbated by the indifferent response from officers and directors toward investor concerns.

The emphasis by People, Ideas & Objects on profitability is deliberate: profitable operations would furnish producers with the necessary capital to manage their enterprises effectively. Governments and investors can never represent the primary sources of funding capable of addressing the substantial financial requirements of the oil and gas sector over the next 25 years. Profitability is the only source of capital capable of meeting the essential needs of this industry. As a primary industry, oil and gas bears responsibility for supporting the vitality of dependent secondary industries. Regrettably, the service industry has been subjected to considerable strain, reducing its capacities and capabilities to as low as 30% of previous levels, with limited intrinsic motivation for recovery. Resolving this challenge would prove complex if producers were to acknowledge it. Ultimately, North American oil and gas must undergo a comprehensive reorganization of its economic structure to attain profitability and restore competitiveness within capital markets. Only People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification offers such a solution. 

Would producers incur a $4.7 trillion revenue shortfall if they prioritized profits? This loss, identified by People, Ideas & Objects in late 2023, arose from a fundamental misunderstanding of business principles. A routine examination of financial statements by officers and directors should have detected the substantial forfeiture of export revenues. Instead, efforts appear to have focused on dismissing this information, often under the pretext that People, Ideas & Objects lacked expertise and that the figure was implausible. For 22 months, this has undermined our credibility while producers have refrained from acknowledging the reality.

Since mid-August, developments have confirmed that Shell lost an arbitration case against Venture Global, seeking billions to recover a portion of their share of industries $4.7 trillion in lost revenues. Venture Global’s second-quarter financial statements indicate that their contracts could yield an additional $197 billion in revenues.

Material developments of this magnitude must be disclosed to shareholders promptly, ideally via an 8-K filing. This obligation extends to all producers engaged in natural gas exports. To date, no such disclosures have been observed. The forthcoming quarterly report, covering the period ending September 30, 2025, is expected around October 31, 2025, at which point producers should fulfill their reporting duties diligently. Failure to do so may invite significant repercussions.

It is also noteworthy that the LNG-related issue forms part of a broader structural decline in natural gas prices since 2009, an area addressed explicitly in the Preliminary Specification. The historical heating value ratio, approximately 6:1 from 2009 onward, has deteriorated to over 50:1 by 2024 and persists. The emergence of LNG markets presented an opportunity to mitigate these pricing challenges, yet over 16 years, no officers or directors independently identified or addressed it. With investors withdrawing support from producers’ capital structures since 2015 due to inadequate performance and accountability—and a viable solution available since August 2012—association with such a record would be undesirable.

Achieving authentic profitability in an organization demands rigorous effort. Current producers demonstrate limited understanding of how to generate profits, the rationale for doing so, or the requisite actions. Their apparent oversight of $4.7 trillion in evaporating revenues, without evident concern, suggests that profit maximization is not a priority. If their primary recourse remains suppressing critics, this conveys more than any explicit admission could.

Podcast # 28, The Preliminary Specification

 I was thinking, what would happen if we put the entire Preliminary Specification through Notebook LM. Would it be able to capture in a single podcast what was contained within? Well here it is. It’s over 45 minutes, it’s in an MP4 format which will use a video player instead of audio. I spent too much time in file conversion hell to warrant the conversion concern. It may take some time to be available and usable after you’ve downloaded it. 

First, the bots approached it objectively. Second they noted its radical nature and finally saw the bigger picture the Preliminary Specification is designed to solve. Well worth the time spent. 

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