June 1, 2000
Oil's very own Icarus
TEXAS AIR ACE Steve Hill may have dropped from the gun-sights over recent months but that is just a temporary aberration, claims the Vietnam vet-turned-dealmaker. Insiders confirm he has landed a couple of low-profile coups on the African oil scene in the past few weeks and that his company continues to consult for the big boys on energy projects up and down the continent. Fresh from turning around Texan E&P minnow Adair International, the high-flyer predicts his Hill & Associates will be making hotter headlines in the year to come. Formerly ABB's Mr. Africa and an enthusiastic proponent of regional gas-to-wire utilization, he is presently working on a scheme to bring on line power-pooling supplies to consumers in deregulated states. Hill enjoys part-ownership of an Oklahoma-based Beechcraft plane re-engineered for high performance and is often spied taking a jet-turbo T-34 military trainer up for a spin. High above the shores of Lake Conroe just a few kilometers north of Houston, he will blithely flip his craft into a heart-stopping corkscrew before pulling six Gs in a loop-the-loop culminating in what aficionados call a hammerhead -- climbing into the sun and stalling the plane before taking a screaming nosedive. That would hardly describe Hill's business strategy, which is based on steadily nurturing relations across Africa coupled with a canny instinct for timing. He's quite unfazed by the gut-curdling maneuvers of acrobatic flying. Most pilots feel a little nausea at some point but we shrug it off and come back for more, he smiles. There's bounty in any high-risk game but for Hill the best trick is circling round for a dogfight in the clouds using laser-guided machine guns that trigger the release of vegetable oil from the manifold to simulate smoke trailers after scoring a hit. And where there's smoke
