An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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Eleven Nations With Large Fossil-Fuel Subsidies

  United States: Fossil Tax Breaks




Photograph by George Steinmetz, National Geographic

Drilling rigs are seen here lying in wait in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 2001, but they've had little time to idle in recent years. The United States is amid an oil and natural gas boom, and its dependence on foreign energy imports is the lowest in 16 years.

(Related: "U.S. Oil Fields Stage "Great Revival," But No Easing Oil Prices")

Economists and historians will likely debate for years the reasons for this revival: How much was due to favorable free market conditions—and how much due to a helping hand from government?

Case in point: Texas, birthplace of the shale gas boom, bestowed more than $1 billion in state severance tax exemptions on the natural gas industry in 2010, according to a survey of fossil-fuel subsidies in OECD member countries.

Although most developed countries do not have the kind of direct and universal consumption subsidies seen in the big oil-exporting nations, tax breaks and other supports lessen the cost of production and consumption. In 2009, the G20 ("the group of 20" nations including the largest economies in the world), committed to phasing out these subsides. But no one had ever catalogued just how large this burden was. So OECD embarked on a first-of-its-kind inventory, and last fall produced its first reports. Although the OECD cautioned that the value and budget impact of subsidies varies widely from state to state (and did not even total the figures), the United States had the largest supports, totaling about $15 billion in 2010.

With G20 leaders meeting today in Los Cabos, Mexico, environmentalists around the world plan demonstrations and a "twitterstorm" to raise awareness of fossil fuel subsidies. But global economic woes are likely to dominate the summit agenda.

U.S. tax breaks, such as the expensing of exploration and development costs, make up about $5 billion of U.S. fossil fuel subsidies. President Barack Obama's proposed 2013 budget would eliminate many of these, yet the proposed cuts are likely to be met with resistance in Congress. Measures that favor home-grown fossil fuel are a tradition as old as the American Republic. Soon after Congress was established and George Washington was sworn in as the first president in 1789, lawmakers enacted a 10 percent tariff on imported coal to give the domestic industry a leg up over British producers; it was the first U.S. fossil-fuel subsidy, but far from the last.

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