The author, a native Texan, is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. After serving in the US Army in Germany during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he worked as a technolgist on offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. This led him to a career as a reporter and managing editor for an oil-industry, international magazine. This work took him to the worlld's leading oil and petroleum-refining regions in Europe, South America, Mexico, Canada, Southeast Asia, Russia and the Persian Gulf.