The promontory itself was acquired by the government in the 1970s as a site for building oil rigs.
Economists were quick to explain away the downturn as a temporary blip, caused by February's freezing weather and the shutdown of shale gas rigs as a result of global oil prices plunging (they have since recovered some ground).
It is a place of contrasts, wooded and farmed, but with a rugged east-facing coastline where you can watch the oil rigs being tugged in for servicing from the North Sea.
Chinese road-building crews and drilling rigs will cut into ancient forests where indigenous groups and uncontacted tribes living in "voluntary isolation" have violently resisted the oil industry.
Rigs are migrating from gassy places like the Haynesville Shale, in Louisiana, to spots where oil is trapped in tiny rock pores, such as the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale in Texas, the Bakken formation of North Dakota and the Mississippian Lime, which sits astride the border between Oklahoma and Kansas.
The American agribusiness giant wants to add Syngenta's know-how to its lucrative seeds portfolio, though any eventual deal is likely to run into opposition from food-policy activists.Environmentalists marshalled their forces in Seattle as Royal Dutch Shell prepared to move drill rigs to the city's port in advance of its exploration of Arctic waters off the Alaskan coast.
Westminster has churned through 14 energy ministers in 17 years.The British government also took ages to clarify how the costs of decommissioning rigs will be divided, discouraging new entrants from buying elderly fields.
They bring pricey, high-tech equipment, from microseismic sensors to drilling rigs that walk, like something out of "Star Wars".
The reason is that one place in the ocean depths where methane hydrate forms all too frequently is inside pipes carrying oil from undersea wells to rigs at the surface.
Oil companies might want to dispose of rigs in deep water, where they might do less harm than if they were dismantled near the shore.
Some guess that Rita may have damaged more rigs than any hurricane in history.
