Those pipelines were profitable but they were, and still are, heavily regulated by federal authorities. It was transporting or selling 17.5% of all the gas consumed in the United States. Enron owned the greatest collection of tubular steel infrastructure ever assembled in one company. By the early 1990s, when Jeff Skilling, a former McKinsey consultant, began his rise to power within Enron, the company and its leaders were, says one veteran gas man, "the kings of the American pipeline business".
Pipelines are the largely invisible, sometimes dangerous, infrastructure that allows America to consume more energy than any country on earth. Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas are moved through some 2 million miles of interstate, intrastate and local pipelines. Every year, pipelines carry some 550 billion gallons of crude and petroleum products to refineries, airports, rail yards and other locations. Yet pipelines are the conduit for the American Dream. Lesser mortals navigate the maze of engineering, metallurgical and legal wrangles that are needed to get those hydrocarbons delivered to the nearest refinery or storage terminal. Real men - particularly fictional ones like Ewing and Rink - find oil and gas. Jett Rink was interested in drilling for oil, not shipping it through a maze of unseen steel tubes.
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