Linda Price, this year’s Norman H. Foster Outstanding Explorer Award, remembers going to bed one night during her time at Liza, the deepwater discovery in the Stabroek Block, off the coast of Guyana in South America, worried about the field, the targets and the promises and projections made to the home office – the entire scope of the operation, in fact.
She and her team had done everything they could, but the enormity of the project still gnawed at her.
She couldn’t sleep.
Her fear?
“I told myself, ‘It may not be as good as you think it is,’” she said.
When asked about her resolve then and, for that matter, throughout her career, she answered, “Your question on confidence is funny. I remember the night the Liza well was supposed to hit its target, because … “ – she laughed – “ … big wells hit their targets at night.”
More on Liza in a moment.
Price was, as she described it, a navy brat and moved around quite a bit in her early days, but always felt close to Montana and Yellowstone because of her grandfather who made such an impression on her.
“I grew up a bit of a nomad, to be honest, and I probably wish I was from there."
She was born, she says, an explorationist, so she had come to expect such insomnia.
But the challenge early in life was discovering what exactly she wanted to explore.
“It took me a while to figure out how to channel my energy,” said Price, who has spent her professional life at ExxonMobil and is now a senior principle – an executive advisory position.
She freely admits she floundered in high school and early college. She majored in art, anthropology and engineering, but there was no enduring interest or spark there – until she discovered the geosciences.
Growing up near Yellowstone National Park, fortunately, provided a literal and figurative backdrop.
It’s not just the rocks, though – it was the voices she heard and the voices she still hears.
“The magic of Yellowstone for me is really about my grandfather, Robert Shirriff,” she said.
Shirriff, a chemical engineer, grew up in Billings, Mont., and he is the one who put geology into her brain when she was a young child with a never-ending curiosity and seemingly hundreds of hobbies, including lapidary and gem faceting.
“He encouraged me by telling me stories of growing up near Yellowstone, letting me play with all his rocks, taking me to science museums and outdoors adventures,” she said.
So when ExxonMobil asked her to be a part of its Bighorn Basin exploration training program, it was serendipitous.
Bighorn is a plateau region and intermontane basin, approximately 100-miles wide, in north-central Wyoming.
“It really brought this history full circle for me at a deep level,” said Price.
The Puzzle and the Path
It’s a complex field, she said of Bighorn, particularly with regard to dynamic petroleum systems and the need to identify material volumes that can profitably support the required engineering infrastructure.
Given that complexity, she said, “The heart of the explorationist mindset requires rapid and accurate learning with an ability to be open to new information as new knowledge emerges.”
It’s not just the journey, though.
The puzzle, while fascinating to her, can only be part of it. She said one must find a path to arrive at “the concrete usage of the information at the end.”
It’s 4,139 miles from Yellowstone to Stabroek Block to Guyana, but it is there where exploration left its most indelible mark. Liza Field, Phase 1, involves 17 wells, comprising eight production wells, six water injection wells and three gas injection wells, and a floating production, storage and offloading vessel.
Liza, which was announced in May of 2015, was the first significant oil find off the coast of Guyana.
Presently, there are two FPSO facilities for the field. One has a 1.2-billion-barrel storage capacity; the other 2 billion barrels. Overall, Guyana, which has fewer than a million people, is poised to become the fourth-largest offshore oil producer in the world.
“Any project with the high uncertainty inherent in exploration, has challenges, and Liza was no different. We were lucky that we had such a good team. The collaboration and trust we had in each other was the key to our resilience,” said Price.
She admits there were multiple points where the project could have gone a less successful way, but in the end, it was trust at a specific interpersonal level that kept it on track.
“That is what technical leadership is all about – building and sustaining trust across the team and the decision-maker levels,” said Price.
She said her biggest fear was that the team would not be able to communicate the quality of the project to senior leaders.
They ultimately did.
“An explorer’s confidence comes from using probabilities and linking different types of data together to find the integrated ideas that are supported by a preponderance of evidence for success,” she added.
There was another lesson that came from Liza.
“Most projects fail before they get off the ground because the evidence does not link together into a success case. Rarely, all the pieces come together with success being the most likely, and the explorer must be able to recognize and communicate the difference in a way that can drive action. Good exploration is high-grading projects effectively and efficiently, or in-short, recognizing the likely from the unlikely quickly,” she explained.
Perspectives on Production, Transition
Through her career, projects in Brazil and West Africa, she said, have also been integral moments of discovery.
“So many have and will continue to fall away. I had the opportunity to work these margins from early discovery days to mature production. That’s the only way to really learn if the exploration hypothesis works – watching the project reality play out over 20-plus years,” she said.
As to the role of exploration, generally, and explorationists, specifically, in the new energy world, she said the similarities, far from being unknown, are reassuring.
“Fundamental subsurface prediction work and the role of the explorationist shouldn’t be different from petroleum to mining to alternative energies. Leading projects with good exploration work will reduce costs, increase innovation and focus the industry,” she said.
She said the biggest challenges, as it was with the Liza project, will be communicating this value to business leaders less familiar with geoscience, and a lack of concrete examples at this point in the energy transition to illustrate it.
“In short, like the early days of petroleum exploration, geoscience will have to lead technically and share knowledge broadly,” she said.
To do this, there needs to be constant modernization, and industry has to stay connected to its subsurface prediction roots.
“Data science, machine learning, technological advances and human-centric solutions will be more of a focus in the future than the field-mapping of the past, but in-the-end, we will need to continue to build skills in Earth science that integrates in fundamental physics, chemistry, math, engineering and so on for the long term if we are going to be able to solve the scale and variety of challenges in the energy transition and beyond,” Price explained.
Celebrating her Tribe
She has, ever since the award was announced, been thinking about family, obstacles and the road to getting to this point in her life.
“My father had an unwavering, no-nonsense confidence in my abilities even when I thought I was failing. I struggled in school (found out later that I had undiagnosed ADHD), and he helped push me into things I wasn’t sure I could do,” she said.
Her father passed away in 2001, “but he still influences me daily.” As for her mother, she was, as Price calls her, “Mama Bear.”
“I knew when I failed, I could always go home.”
In addition to her friends and co-workers and her husband and family – she has boy/girl twins, Roy and Isabel – she wants it known that the women in the industry have sustained her.
“You cannot work in the oil industry as a woman without your tribe,” Price said.
To that end, in 2018, she was the first woman recognized by ExxonMobil with the Peter R. Vail Award for Technical Achievement in Geoscience.
If she had to give advice to the next generation of explorationists, she said she would tell them, “Find value in your geoscience knowledge to society, rather than only finding petroleum or mineral volumes that includes optimal carbon storage locations or other innovative solutions that support both a low carbon and a sustainable energy future that supports society. Open your aperture to your career.”
She remembers her first assignment at Exxon. It was 1997 and her job was to interpret a sparse 2-D seismic survey over offshore Congo and Angola, stitching together deepwater depositional systems to inform strategic business decisions.
“I was hooked,” she said. “It’s been a fun career.”
Even if she doesn’t always sleep through the night.
Editor’s note: This corrects a previous version of this article that got some details wrong about Linda Price’s childhood, family and career. We apologize for the errors.