Oil prices are wallowing in the $65 a barrel territory these days, less than half the level crude hit this summer. It even dipped below $60 briefly. But the real number to think about is $40 a barrel, a former oil exec turned investor told me. Why? Well, $40 a barrel is the level that many Middle Eastern OPEC nations need to achieve to continue to fund their somewhat lavish public works and social programs, the exec estimated. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait aren't cheap countries to run. The economic explosion in the past few years has caused a building boom in Dubai, which in turn has meant more public works projects. Some of the newest, smoothest pavement in the world can be found there. Many countries also offer massive incentives to U.S., European and Asian institutions to install offices and facilities there. In Dubai, for instance, chip companies can qualify for tax holidays that last 50 years. Texas A&M, Cornell, Northwestern, Georgetown and Carnegie-Mellon have all opened satellite campuses in Qatar while NYU and MIT are opening campuses in Abu Dhabi. Building a school out of scratch isn't easy. The hospital associated with Cornell's medical school has an endowment in the billions. Citizens often tend to expect cushy, well-paying jobs from their home governments. Many governments are trying to phase out these programs, and hope that the universities will generate opportunities for private sector jobs in the region, but workfare-like employment persists. OPEC nations probably aren't too terrified of oil skirting the $40 a barrel level just yet. The current drop in prices has largely been caused by a decline in demand due to economic conditions and the bursting of the speculative bubble in commodities. It did not result from new oil strikes outside of OPEC or the sudden availability of cheap ethanol or electric cars. An economic turnaround, combined with a further dwindling of existing supplies, could perk prices back up. Nonetheless, the outlook for oil producers is certainly less optimistic than it was a year ago and transportation technology continues to improve. So keep that number in mind.

Will the high-tech world ever get away from Intel?

Probably not. The company supplies chips for around 80 percent of the world’s PCs and servers and heavily influences the standards for packaging, manufacturing, lithography and computer design.

But the company also plays a large, and often unseen role, in corporate management. Intel alumni are everywhere, and they take their aggressive obsessions with numbers, manufacturability, constructive confrontation (i.e., yelling at meetings; drinking afterward), scalability and "two-in-a-box" management wherever they go. Two of Silicon Valley’s most storied VCs, John Doerr and Bill Davidow, came from the Intel sales department. Chip companies like Rambus and National Semiconductor are run by ex-Intel guys. It’s like a finishing school for the hard-nosed.

And now, you’re seeing the Blue Shirts pop up in greentech. Paul Misso, CEO of small wind turbine specialist Marquiss Wind Power came out of the Folsom offices of Intel. Ron Smith, who ran the wireless and flash memory units for Intel during the go-go late '90s, will soon come out of stealth with a startup that takes the heat produced by solar panels to power solar water heaters. Sub-One Technology, the anti-corrosion company working with Chevron Texaco? Run by Intel alum Andrew Tudhope.

GainSpan, a smart metering company that can control the power consumption of household appliances, is run by Vijay Parmar. The company grew out of a project he ran at the Intel labs.

Pete Van Deventer, who marketed chipsets out of Intel’s Folsom facilities, is the CEO of SynapSense, which monitors and controls power consumption in data centers with sensors and software. (Yahoo managed to cut its cooling power consumption by 21 percent in a Synapse-rigged datacenter.). The company plans to move into the market for building control.

Claude Leglise, the suave former head of Intel Capital, also has a company, say sources. It leases space on rooftops for solar installations.

Several Intel engineers have gone to work at OptiSolar, according to sources. And earlier this year, Intel spun out SpectraWatt while Intel Capital began to invest in alternative energy and energy efficiency companies.

And Andy Grove is going to teach a course on plug-in transportation at Stanford next year. The company itself is also involved in pretty much every green IT panel you can imagine.

Given the size of the company, it’s natural that you’d see Intel alums pop up. But Hewlett-Packard and IBM are big companies too and you don’t see those names popping up on executive CVs as much.

If you find yourself in a pitch meeting and the speaker uses eight three letter acronyms in five minutes, chances are you're listening to one of them. Don't say I didn't warn you.