Tom Whitehurst

Hunting buried treasure

Treasure hunts and pirates - who'd have guessed that petroleum geology could be so much fun?
   I never met Reese Rowling, the multimillionaire Corpus Christi oilman who died Tuesday, but he nevertheless taught me some valuable life lessons about petroleum geology, priorities and preconceived notions.
   Rowling liked petroleum geology so much that he pursued it to the end of his life, at age 73. Never mind that he had tons of money and didn't have to work anymore, never mind that the family fortune was now more closely associated with the Omni hotel chain, and never mind that he loved golf, which takes enough time to stay occupied avoiding occupation.
   Those who knew him say he loved the chase for oil and gas more than he enjoyed the money it produced. Until then, I had always thought that rich folks who said money was incidental were lying. I especially thought that anyone who went into petroleum geology did it mainly for the money.
   So I called a few who are a long way from retirement age and, guess what. They all say they can picture themselves doing it well past retirement age, no matter how much money they have. And they all describe it in terms of a treasure hunt.
   "It's a challenge and it's about the most exciting thing you can do, kind of like a treasure hunt, almost like fishing," said Robert Bennett, a geologist who worked with Rowling. "People go fishing, they tag and release, they don't necessarily want the fish, they just like the chase."
   Thrill of the chase
   And there's the competition, which can be almost cloak-and-dagger-like. Bennett said he generally didn't like it to be known that he was working for Rowling because other geologists would be a lot more interested in what he was doing at the library, knowing that if Rowling was involved, the chance of discovery was greater.
   "The business is full of pirates," Bennett said, "as long as we're talking about treasure hunts."
   Other geologists said that's not paranoia.
   "I think people would have the perception that if he was working on something and Reese was backing him, people would think it was something significant," said Evan Schulz, a geologist who knows Bennett. "Sometimes two people are chasing the same idea. But it's really a friendly competition."
   New technology
   The excitement can come from looking where no one else has looked, or from looking where others already looked and gave up. Or - and colleagues say this often was Rowling's experience - a new drilling technology finally came along that could reach a reserve that the geologist had discovered years earlier.
   Most of the hunting and marauding goes on inside offices while poring through records and computer images - not exactly a setting for a Schwarzenegger movie. But that's generally where the big eureka moments occur. There are exceptions.
   "One time lying in bed in the middle of the night, the idea for a prospect came together and I just had to get up and run downtown and put it on the map," Bennett said.
   On-the-job learning
   Geologists don't necessarily grow up knowing that someday they want to do this.
   "I had no idea and I don't think anybody did," Schulz said. "I didn't have a dad in the business and I really had no experience in the oil and gas business. I was always pretty good in the sciences and I got to the point where I had to declare a major, and I really didn't know what it was all about until I got out. The books can only teach you so much."
   An upswing
   All of the local geologists seem to know each other. Part of the reason, Schulz says, is that they're all roughly the same age. They enter the field in cycles that track the upswings in the industry. There are a bunch in town between the ages of 35 and 50, he says, who entered the field after the oil embargo days and before the mid-1980s downturn. Any other geologists are either much older or much younger.
   "Now that there's been an upswing in the oil business," Schulz said, "you'll start seeing more geologists and engineers coming out of college."
   Geology professor Michael Jordan of Texas A&M University-Kingsville says that seems to be true.
   "My classes are all full, somewhat fuller than they've been. I've been so doggone busy I haven't had time to talk to my colleagues and see how they're doing. To see how big of a difference it'll make depends on how long it's sustained. If the money keeps flowing into domestic exploration, we'll see things change back to the way they were in the early 1980s."
   It's a science thing
   Jordan says the thrill of the chase isn't peculiar to geology.
   "It's a form of science and there are all kinds of challenges in science of any kind. A lot of the great discoveries of the past were made by folks who had time on their hands, lots of gentleman farmers. They really didn't have to work too hard for a living and they'd go into whatever they found was useful. And the government didn't pay them to go into research. They just did it for the thrill."
   'Thrill of discovery'
   Jordan says he can understand the impulse that drove Rowling.
   "There's just the thrill of discovery. That really gets some people really deep. If you've got the heart of a scientist, that probably doesn't know any retirement boundaries, as long as your mind works and you keep exercising it.
   "I hope I go out like that. Consider the alternative."
  
  

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