The Surprising Rise And Fall Of A Shale Superstar

In many ways, the roller-coaster-like trajectory of Vicki Hollub’s shale CEO career is emblematic of the boom-and-bust, spectacularly dramatic history of the West Texas Permian basin as a whole. When Hollub took over Occidental in 2016, the unbridled enthusiasm for the shale revolution that catapulted the United States to the top of the global oil production food chain was already fading. In 2019, she had made her relatively small company one of the biggest and most buzzed-about oil firms in the country. Now, she’s a cautionary tale. …