Active in the international upstream oil and gas industry since 1999 with involvement in commercial and technical roles for operators, non-operators and consulting firms, but my real involvement started before I was even born. Both my parents are geophysicists and were already being posted to places such as Libya before I was even born. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would grow up an expat-brat and end up following in their footsteps? As a young teenager my summer holidays were spent digitising well logs and listening to stories around the dinner table about the time when the Libyan police raided my parents house looking for illegal booze. The oil industry was in my blood.
The Story So Far
Starting Out
It didn’t seem that way in 1999 when I graduated as an engineer from Cambridge University. The oil price had plunged to $10/bbl lows and landing a job in the oil industry was near impossible. The perception was that the oil industry was a dinosaur. Getting a foot in the door was a game of patience as it seemed no-one was hiring when I graduated. Even BPAmocoArco, newly formed after a merger between three large oil companies, wouldn’t take me on despite taking all the petroleum engineering students and geologists from Cambridge University on what was effectively an all-expenses paid weekend to their Wytch Farm field in Dorset. The catch was (of course), “please consider coming to work for us”. So I applied, only to receive a rejection letter that the deadline for applications had closed… the closing date was a full week before the weekend they had wooed us. My first insights into large companies and the respective capabilities of their left and right hands!
When applying for a job at Novus Petroleum in 2000, I was asked by the then CEO, Dr Bob Williams, where I saw myself in five years time. Cheekily I answered that I wanted to be the CEO of my own oil company by the time I was thirty. When, at the age of thirty, I helped to found and became an executive director of Lodore Resources, a listed exploration company, I must confess I was only joking in that interview. However, I landed a role as the grandiose-sounding “Commercial Assistant to CEO” at Novus Petroleum in 2000, and spent an enlightening ten years working closely with Bob, pursuing oil and gas opportunities around the world.
It was a hands-on MBA without the degree. Although I had wanted a technical engineering job, I ended up in a more generalist role supporting the CEO directly. I often explain that ‘work’, as an entity, has an uncanny ability to find those people most capable of doing it, and sadly it appeared I was in the capable camp. It kept me very busy. Bob and I used to describe my role as his “spare brain”. As a springboard to start a career, it would be hard to imagine a better one. My introduction to the oil industry involved a fair share of world travel, but more than that it was the exposure to the full gamut of what makes an oil company tick: interacting with technical teams, government regulators, joint venture partners etc. It all came to an end in 2004, following a hostile takeover bid by Medco Energi launched days before Christmas in 2003. At the time I was going to relocate to Houston to be involved with Novus’ growing US portfolio. All my belongings were in a container sailing halfway around the world. C’est la vie.
In the ensuring years after Novus I’ve experienced the highs and lows of the oil industry. I’ve promoted and drilled exploration prospects in the United States as an executive director of an AiM-listed oil and gas company, Lodore Resources, picking up where Novus had left off. Lodore’s first well, Kami, was a discovery and but its second and third were duds, arriving just as the financial crisis of 2007-2008 hit. It was a sad day when we realised we would have to close Lodore. We had a limited amount of cash left in the bank and it wouldn’t be possible to pay all the staff out. Realising I would need to live with whatever decision I took for the rest of my life, Bob and I decided we would pay all the staff out in full and take the haircut ourselves. My wife has never forgiven me, but at least I sleep well at night.
The Consulting Years
Later I moved into consulting, first forming Sunov Petroleum Advisers with Bob, and then moving onto Independent Project Analysis (IPA) after the global financial crisis put an end to the viability of Sunov. It was at IPA where I was exposed me to the world of large capital projects. Where Novus had exposed me to the smaller opportunities available to junior oil and gas companies, with IPA I found myself analysing project delivery for NOCs, majors and large independent E&Ps. I like to explain that the role was like being the host of the TV show “Grand Designs” for industrial projects. As an IPA consultant the whole project was assessed, from inception through to delivery and completion, including cost, schedule and technical requirements. The whole shebang. I used to keep a diary/logbook of all the fields that I had analysed and in the time that I was at IPA I had looked at over 100 fields. Given that I was there for about four and half years, this equates to roughly a new field very fortnight. Quite a pace.
Papua New Guinea Beckons
My time at IPA came to an end as I was recruited by Twinza Oil Limited in 2014. Curiously this is also the first and only time I’ve left a company for greener pastures – all other occasions having been forced to change jobs because the company had reached the end of its life. Although Twinza was small, I knew some of the folks there through my previous roles at Sunov and IPA, so I knew what I was getting into. As opportunities go, the Pasca A field looked challenging (especially back in 2014), but it held promise and the company was recently flush with cash from a private equity investment.
My current role has finally allowed me to get hands-on with the engineering and bring all that I learned on project delivery through IPA to an actual development. The Pasca A field is now very an important keystone in my career, and having invested over decade into the planning of its development, I very much look forward to being able to take it through to first hydrocarbons. Seeing a project through from concept to production is something that many in the oil industry don’t get to experience, simply due to the length of time it takes to develop and oil and gas field.
Outside my actual job, I’m also actively developing the Pyrus Suite of software. This application gathers together all the engineering tools that I’ve developed for myself over the years, and allows me to share back to the industry. Whilst some might be suspicious because I’m giving it away for free, there is a grand plan behind it all, but I’ll leave it there for now…
Contact
This site and its content is created and maintained by Peter Kirkham, an upstream industry professional. Since 2024, when I published Pyrus, interest has grown in what I’m involved with, which is as much a surprise to myself as to anyone else. The irony of our connected world today is that despite the existence of instant communication technology via the internet, it can be very difficult to reach out and contact someone you’ve never met before. Digital agents (or ‘bots’ as they are often referred to by the media) scrape the internet for email addresses that they can sell to scammers, so putting an email address on a webpage is asking for trouble. Even social media sites like LinkedIn limit how messages can be sent to users of their platform, and since I won’t accept a contact request from people that I don’t know, it can be difficult to ask me a question privately.
To get around that I have a contact form that should send a message using the secret squirrel network to my private lair. If I’m intrigued by what you have to say, I might even respond!