Aubrey McClendon’s car was traveling 78 miles per hour when it crashed, killing him on March 2, the Oklahoma City police said Monday. The shale oil pioneer’s 2013 Chevy Tahoe hit a wall and burst into flames on a two-lane road close to the city.
McClendon tapped on the brakes many times, but didn’t act to slow the automobile in the last 31 feet before the disaster happened, the police said. Police said they are continuing to investigate. The medical examiner has said McClendon died from multiple blunt force trauma. A toxicology report is still likely to launch.
The previous day the crash, a federal grand jury charged McClendon in connection with a scheme between two “large oil and gas companies” to prevent bidding against one another for leases in northwest Oklahoma from December 2007 to March 2012. In a statement hours after the indictment was announced, McClendon known as the charge “wrong and unprecedented.”
McClendon, 56, co-founded Chesapeake Energy Corp., expanding it from modest beginnings in to the second-largest U.S. natural gas producer, thanks to his championing of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling at a time when larger, more established players were skeptical of shale’s potential. At its height in June 2008, Chesapeake was valued at US$37.5 billion.
Tumbling gas prices from an oversupply of the heating and power plant fuel ultimately resulted in McClendon’s ouster from Chesapeake in 2013, after the company’s value fell by over fifty percent. He then formed American Energy Partners LP, and raised a lot more than US$10 billion for acquisitions.
Related
- Hatching plans right to the end: A look within the final days of Chesapeake Energy co-founder Aubrey McClendonFormer Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon dies in car crash a day after being accused of rigging Oklahoma bidsAubrey McClendon dies at 56: Former Chesapeake CEO would be a mythical character who pioneered the shale revolution
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The site from the crash was in a rural area about 20 minutes northeast of his offices in Oklahoma City. The country road McClendon sped down offered limited room for manoeuvering, with thick, bushy trees on side and no shoulder on the highway. A preliminary police report from the crash said McClendon wasn’t wearing his seatbelt while traveling at a high rate of speed. The listed posted speed limit was 50 miles an hour.
Police said last week these were working on a pc reanimation of the accident and were rechecking and confirming all data and calculations for the completed accident report and planned to produce it early this week.
Bloomberg News
