Kate Richard grew up in the ultimate company town, Oklahoma City, where virtually every adult seemed to labor for King Oil, and dinner-table talk revolved around the newest exploits of the industry’s flamboyant wildcatters-turned-tycoons.
As a youngster, Richard thrilled to her grandfather’s stories of sinking the earliest wells in Angola for what’s now Conoco, and the accounts from her great uncle—a founder of Devon Energy—of planting platforms in the Caspian Sea off Azerbaijan following the fall of the Soviet Union.
