Todd Bush

🌎🏭☁️🔥❇️ Building the low-carbon ecosystem

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@fortworthchris people go to where the jobs are and Texas is booming in several directions. check out TXecon for more details https://t.co/LzDK1zGx0q

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@girdley no land available here, sorry

[Chris Powers @fortworthchris]

Tomorrow I'm sitting down with @JohnMcQueeneyTX, Texas State Rep (HD-97) and a member of the committee shaping how the state responds to the data-center boom.

John just spent a day inside Stargate, OpenAI's mega-project in Abilene. 8 buildings. A gigawatt substation. 9,500 workers on site at peak. But what stuck with him was the local impact. Construction managers from Oregon buying homes. Country club memberships in town doubling in six months.

This clip is his report from the ground.

[Collin McLelland 🏴‍☠️ @FracSlap]

I'm looking to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer in Midland.

If you have oil and gas experience, know your way around tools like Claude Code and codex and aren't afraid to get into the data -- I want to talk to you.

We're sitting on-site with some of the largest energy companies in the world, helping them actually put AI to work. That takes someone who knows the industry and can move fast with our tech.

What I'm looking for:

- Real oil and gas background
- Hands-on with Claude Code or similar AI coding tools
-Ability to learn our foundational tech stack
- Comfortable with data wrangling and making sense of messy operational data
- Forward thinking on where AI is headed in energy

DM me if that's you or if you know someone.

I will pay you $5,000 if refer the right person.

[Chuck Yates @nimblephatty]

LATEST OLD MAN COFFEE BLOG

Out Over Your Skis

In my 32 years in this business, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: you don’t make real money playing in the middle of the bell curve. You make it way out on the tail.

When you buy an asset, you’ve paid more than anybody else thought it was worth. When you drill a well, you’re punching a hole where nobody’s ever punched one before. You’ve gotta be out over your skis.

Most people hear that phrase and think “reckless.” I think “necessary.” Play it safe and you’ll either do nothing or make mediocre returns. Neither one pays for the lake house.

History’s full of guys who got it. Aubrey McClendon bet the farm on shale when everyone else called it science fiction. Tom “Dry Hole” Slick drilled so many duds they nicknamed him after his failures — until he discovered the Cushing field and became the King of the Wildcatters.

These boys weren’t careful. They were committed.

And here’s the part that might sting a little: the same damn rule applies to AI right now.

You gotta be uncomfortable.

Sure, AI will let us automate a bunch of G&A and double the size of our assets without adding headcount. Some companies will save 25% on overhead and throw themselves a nice party. That’s nice. That’s table stakes.

The real prize? We’re only getting five to ten percent of the oil in place out of the ground right now. If AI can help us push that to fifteen or twenty percent, that’s not incremental — that’s generational wealth. That’s the difference between being another oil company and being the one that actually changed the game.

So what does “out over your skis” actually look like for an oil and gas CEO in 2026?

Here are three things that sound borderline insane but are actually grounded:
• Give every employee a personal AI budget and a mandate to automate at least one of their own tasks every quarter. No approvals. Some of it’ll be dumber than a bag of hair. Some of it’ll be pure gold.
• Require every VP to spend one full day a month with no meetings — just playing with AI tools. Call it “Ski Day.” If your head of drilling isn’t using AI agents, you’re already behind. And yes, I will be laughing at you.
• Treat your company’s internal data like the most valuable leasehold you’ve ever acquired. Hire a small team of absolute weirdos, turn them loose, and let them go feral on it.

The winners won’t be the ones with the perfect five-year AI strategy. They’ll be the ones already elbows-deep in it, breaking shit and learning what this stuff can actually do.

Time to get out over your skis. The snow’s not gonna wait for you.

Sip slow, my friends.

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@Shpigford #95

[Chuck Yates @nimblephatty]

Collide rolls out RIGGS AI platform to reshape oil and gas workflows - Energy Capital https://t.co/Mk908hivle

[Chuck Yates @nimblephatty]

Yeah this is going down…

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

amazing to see this go from concept to reality

[Aaron Davis @Aaron74627380]

@FracSlap @bmbrigham

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@Molson_Hart @FreightAlley The community benefits side need to be shared early and often with the local community. Here more from an actual project developer in Ohio — https://t.co/gVWcpMrbQA

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@Molson_Hart @FreightAlley The community benefits side need to be shared early and often with the local community. Here more from an actual project developer in Ohio — https://t.co/gVWcpMrbQA

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@AngryCops community engagement is lacking for most data center projects. Check out Shawn Cutter from EnergiAcres talk through the data center project realities at https://t.co/KrtXTA6VrN

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

Look at that map.
Every red arrow is a tanker.
All converging on The Gulf of America.
This is the world rerouting in real time.

🚢 167 crude tankers declared US destinations
🛢️ 103 empty vessels steaming to load American crude
⛽ US exports already at record 12.7M b/d
📈 Heading to 15M b/d and climbing

From 1995 to 2015 the US couldn't legally export crude.
In 2026 it's about to become the world's largest oil exporter.
Hormuz closed.
Qatar gone.
Saudi output cut.
Russia back to sanctions...
And every tanker on this map already knew where to go.

Do not miss my latest article to understand what come next:
https://t.co/v8oKz75K5p

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@everestchris6 solar

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Houston is what happens when the physical world starts mattering again.

That chart is a regime signal.

A metro that large adding that much real GDP that fast means capital is flowing toward throughput, energy, logistics, engineering, fabrication, and movement of actual molecules. Houston is not winning because it has better vibes. Houston is winning because the economy still runs on power, pipes, ports, chemicals, steel, freight, and scale.

That is the part a lot of people still do not get. The last cycle trained everyone to worship abstraction. Apps, media, software, branding, financial engineering, digital prestige. Then the world got more constrained, more fragmented, more inflationary, more physical. Suddenly the winners look different. Power matters. Land matters. shipping matters. Industrial competence matters. Houston lives there.

The deeper truth is that Houston is one of the clearest expressions of American hard power inside a city. Energy complex. Port complex. petrochemicals. aerospace adjacency. medical scale. construction. immigration. Business formation. It is one of the few places in America where the old industrial world and the new compute world can actually shake hands. AI can talk all day about transforming civilization. Civilization still needs electricity, cooling, concrete, gas, transport, and buildable land. Houston sits closer to those choke points than most of the prestige cities that dominate the cultural conversation.

That is why this growth matters at size. Small boomtowns can rip for a while on one narrow driver. Houston doing this means the underlying machine is broad. It has enough depth to convert population, capital, infrastructure, and commodity advantage into real output. That is a very different thing from a tourism bounce or a housing sugar high.

The highest coherence read is simple.

America is rotating back toward cities that can do hard things.

Not talk about them.
Not regulate them.
Not aestheticize them.

Do them.

Houston is ugly, functional, rich in substrate, and built for scale. In a serious era, those traits start compounding.

That is what this chart is really saying.

The future is getting more physical again.

Houston was already there.

[Todd Bush @bushwik]

@arvidkahl @itsjustamar the marketingskills repo from @coreyhainesco is a great one to add to the list

[Greater Houston Partnership @GHPartnership]

Texas continues to lead U.S. population growth, with Greater Houston at the epicenter.

Waller County is now the second-fastest-growing county in the nation, while the Houston metro added more residents than any other U.S. region.

📍See the growth across the Greater Houston region: https://t.co/MxSLcJUMaa

[Sasquatch Unfiltered @sasquatchvlogtv]

The new Reacher season trailer is absolutely insane 🔥🔥🔥

[A Crude Awakening @allengilmer]

Proud to share my first podcast, Crude Awakenings. The goal of the podcast is to share the very personal stories of the people doing interesting things in energy. I very much subscribe to the Person is more important than the Idea. Most business plans need to pivot at some point, and it’s always the people that make the difference. My first guest is Scott Anderson of Anderson Oil, Ltd., who, along with his late father Bruce, talked me into leaving a great job at Marathon Oil and going independent 33 years ago, more than half a lifetime ago, and the last paycheck from a job I didn’t create. https://t.co/JZlsaDBYat

[Kumar🇺🇸 @datarade]

California will legislate itself into heat death.

Texas can rise as the contender.

Heres' what Texas *might* be able to do to steal the thunder on the labor front.

https://t.co/1YPG0ziED2