"A search through previous Thoughtlets shows 19 which refer to my summer of 1970 working for Pan American Petroleum in Denver (../9728.html four times, ../9729.html three times, ../9827.html twice, and ../0341.html twice. A similar search for Amoco shows 37 listing. Although many of them refer to later interactions with the company, rather than when I worked for Amoco the summer of 1973 in Denver (some references which seem to relate to this summer include ../9728.html three times, ../9735.html three times, ../0044.html twice, and ../0341.html twice times. However, a search on the words "Craig Hanson" are not referenced once in previous Thoughtlets. I start here because of the following e-mail:
Craig Hanson was the big boss both of the summers of 1970 and 1973, when I was a summer intern in Denver at Pan American and then, after the name change, Amoco. He liked me. He would invite me down to his office to talk about things, and it bothered some of the other summer interns. Oh well! Craig's e-mail got me thinking back on those two summers, and how they set direction of my professional career.
The summer before my mission, 1970, Craig Hanson, Darrell Bedo, Bob Kalwait, and Alex Benton (collectively my bosses) sent me out to the field crews with one of their scouts, I think his name was Spooky Johnson. A scout was a land man, who bought property, and also someone who worked with all of the other companies working in the area to get copies of well logs, and to find out competitive information. Spooky was the best there was, according to several folks I talked to. At one point we were up by Green River, Wyoming where I saw my first seismic dynamite hole blow out in the river bottom. It must have sent mud over 100 feet into the air. Looking back, there must have been pretty big charges in those holes. The shooting program called for the seismic line to go right past a famous rock mesa at Rock Springs. The hole was drilled and charge planted right at the base of this rock, and we ended up not setting it off for fear it would cause the rocks to break and fall. The dynamite is still buried there.
Then there was the time when I was working with the surveyors and they asked me to drive the truck across a stream to pick up the flagman. It was like at home, and I gunned the truck and flew across the stream, recalling having driven a tractor off of the hard packed road once to avoid some water, only to sink the tractor up to it's axle in the water soaked sediments adjacent to the road. Anyway, there was another truck following me, with a 20 year experienced field man driving. He followed my tracks, and ended up dropping the truck to the axle in the mud. It took two trucks to pull him out of the hole he dug. There were some fairly angry comments about how `that kid drove through the stream like it was no problem, and look what happened to me.'
Once we had an hour delay with the moving ahead on the seismic line. I was working out in front laying out geophones, and was told we needed to wait for an hour our two. So I went for a hike looking for Indian arrowheads and climbing some of the hills. At the top of one, I looked down and saw the Green River. It was very hot, and even though I'm not a very good swimmer, I went down to the river, stripped, and went for a swim. It felt good and was a lot of fun.
Then when we were heading back to Denver, Spooky decided to take me on a detour and show me some of the oldest fossils in the world. There were these ridges where there was all of this rock he referred to as petrified moss, and another ridge that was full of fossils. These rocks are still in my rock garden in the back yard. On one vacation to Utah we rented a U-Haul trailer and went looking for these outcrops. We ended up not finding them, but we did bring back the layered sandstone rock which is in front of the house. Some of you might remember the song I wrote on 07 September 1992 titled `1307 Emerald Green,' which starts out with:
I also remember that this summer Alex Benton had me do a bunch of research on the Nugget / Navajo sandstone in the geotechnical literature. I compiled the results of this work into a big montage, and printed several big blue-line prints of it. I still have a copy of this someplace.
When I returned to the Security Life Building to work for what was now Amoco for my second summer, in 1973, after my mission, the first thing that happened was that Alex Benton had me take down and file this big montage of the Nugget / Navajo sandstone, which had been on his wall as a reference tool for the previous three years. I recall he told me how useful it had been, and how often he had referred to it. Made me feel like I had accomplished something good my first summer there. My boss was Bob Kalweit. Most of this second summer was spent getting ready for the Amoco seismic acquisition on the Great Salt Lake. I spent a lot of time in a teletype room, submitting jobs to Amoco's Tulsa computer center to calculate seismic source and receiver array responses for various configurations of sources and receivers hung off of the barges which were used to do the seismic data collection.
Twice I was pulled out of meetings to go to a meeting with R.C. (Craig) Hanson, the big boss. The first time was because they wanted to name the two barges they were going to use for seismic acquisition, and they didn't want to offend the local people. They ended up naming the barges `The Nephi' and `The Lehi.' The second time was to get chewed out because the 24th of July is a State Holiday in Utah, which Craig did not know about, and which ended up costing Amoco a bunch of extra money. They had shipped these two barges from Alaska and brought them to Utah by train. They could not get a permit to move the extra wide load on the 24th of July because it was a state holiday. So I ended up telling Craig Hanson all about the first arrival of the pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley on the 24th of July of 1847, and how Pioneer Day has come to be celebrated in the state.
The thing that is so interesting to me about this story, is the fact the contractor who moved the barges from Alaska to Utah was Jack Krupenbach. Jack joined Landmark when Landmark purchased Energy Innovations (../9945.html and ../0026.html). Every time I see Jack, he says, `There's my hero!' Turns out Jack became independently wealthy from his sale of Landmark Stock. He lives up in the northeast now, has a conservative think tank he sponsors, and is basically retired. And we crossed paths, without even knowing it, years before we did the 3-D ground penetrating radar seismic survey, with the accompanying trenching of the site to prove ground truth, back in about 1992.
My ideas for an interactive 3-D seismic interpretation system were developed during these two summers I worked at Pan American and Amoco under Craig Hanson. And there are many more things that happened these summers, like the songs Quentin Reed and I wrote, etc. However, so as to not make this week's Thoughtlet unbearably long, I will not strive to recall all of my Pan American / Amoco memories.
I will point out that Craig Hanson followed up his e-mail with a call on Wednesday the 14th of December. Among other things, during this short telephone call, he said to me, `Roice, I don't know if you know it or not, but you're pretty well known in the industry.' It was very flattering to have my first geophysical boss say these words. We arranged to meet on Tuesday the 20th of December. Craig has good experience from when he managed Amoco's overthrust discoveries in the 1970's and 1980's. However, he has been playing golf and on cruises for so long, he has lost track of the industry and his contacts. He is interested in leveraging the interest generated by the Wolverine discovery near Richfield, to do a large Amoco style overthrust play. The biggest issue he faces is he does not have the leases Amoco had. Amoco had tremendous mineral leases when Craig headed up their exploration projects through their connections with the railroads. It will be interesting to see if anything comes from these conversations beyond reviving my Pan American / Amoco memories.
There are a few notes about things that happened this week. Monday morning was Larry Law's funeral. I had jury duty, and decided it would better to go and hope I was released early enough to go to the funeral rather than to attempt to reschedule. I'm sure a key part of this decision was how hurt I was when I learned how Larry was writing love letters to Linda Jones, and one of the reasons he stayed at the house for so long after his divorce was so he could meet her and go on long walks with her. There is much more to this story, and someday, maybe it will be worth writing about. I'm sure someone with a significant brain tumor was not all there in regards to interpersonal relationships. However, it still bothers me to have been used in a way which has caused such pain to another of my good friends, Dan Jones. So I went to do my jury duty, and was released with out even having been put on a panel, at about 11:30 AM. Too late to go to the funeral. However, Andrea went, and she brought me a program. Key parts of the program include:
Zimmerman called Monday afternoon. On Tuesday there was a meeting with Chevron/Unocal, and so I went by and saw Rick and his team before the meeting. It was a good meeting, and was one of the reasons I was so optimistic I would be working closely with Texas Independent come the first of the year. Didn't happen. Oh well! The meeting with Chevron/Unocal was very interesting. I have been so sequestered, I did not realize the Chevron purchase of Unocal had come to fruition.
Not only had the sale been finalized, but the two companies have been merged, and the Unocal folks are all downtown in the Enron building next to Rick's building. Donna Venabold, who was a contractor for HyperMedia Corporation for several years through HyperMedia Corporation was one of the participants in the meeting. She is very outspoken. Before the meeting started, she made a couple of comments about all of the contributions I have made to the industry, and how no one realizes how significant those contributions are. Of course, I like to hear this kind of unsolicited praise. During the meeting she talked about GDC and AVO. I did not take detailed notes, and so I probably have some of this information mixed up.
Basically Donna lectured the Chevron folks in Houston, Denver, and San Ramon (who were on a teleconference meeting) about Unocal's work with GDC. They did some 18 different benchmarks of GDC's GDCMOD application against other systems as an accurate AVO modeling tool. GDCMOD always came out the best. At one point Unocal had 99 licenses to GDCMOD, and they were using up to 60 of these licenses simultaneously in preparing for some lease sales. Now Chevron/Unocal have one borrowed license, because they have not kept up with their maintenance payments, and have a project they needed a license to complete. There are a half-a-dozen expert users of GDCMOD in Chevron/Unocal. This discussion came in the middle of a presentation I was giving on Tiles and the recent work we have done at GDC. Some who were not in the meeting were very upset about what they heard Donna had said. However, I found it fascinating and very worthwhile. I learned more about GDC's contribution through GDCMOD in that meeting than I have in a couple of years at GDC. Isn't that typical?
On Tuesday evening there was an interesting call from Christian Singfield. He passed on the following insight from Mike Hagney, who is at Sun Microsystems and is on the FSI Board of Directors. Mike says that the oil and gas industry agrees on the value of a new technology when the answers to the following questions are yes:
Wednesday was a challenge. The battery cable on the blue Saturn shorted out. There had been a bad electrical storm, and the Internet was out. The toilet in the master bathroom was clogged up and I could not get it unclogged. The faucet leaks were becoming very bad. Anyway, we attacked them one at a time. I worked on the car until I was able to get the battery cable to work, took the car to Gary's, got them to look at it, and went to work. Andrea got the plumber to come in and unclog the toilet, and to replace the faucets in the Master Bathroom. The new faucets have a neat shape, and are a pretty purple color, like the color of the last Caravan Paul and I bought. Marc talked me through fixing the Internet. Turns out I had to reboot the system. Anyway, even though it was fairly overwhelming for a while, it all worked out, and it is hard to remember all of this now.
Thursday morning Dave Johnson brought kolechi's. He was sitting in my office, when I got a telephone call from Carlos to tell me there were kolechi's in the kitchen. Dave got the biggest kick out of the underground communication channels to pass this information on. Thursday afternoon was the annual GDC Christmas Party. It was at Dave & Buster's again this year. I went and ate, and came back to the office to keep working on the stuff for China. I was about the only one that was working. I was finishing up a 300 page report for Ji Dong Oilfield. It was a big project.
On Saturday I went back to Gary's Tire & Auto and got the battery cable replaced and the blue Saturn inspected. I don't remember what else happened on Friday or Saturday. We probably watched Numb3rs Friday, and some other TV show of Saturday. However, a highlight for my week was retreating into my Pan American / Amoco memories."