The ability to lead – the actual acknowledgement that those around you want you to lead – is still, says one who’s been honored for having such abilities, is as much a mystery and joy as it’s ever been.
“It is a weird and an enjoyable sensation,” said Edward A. (Ted) Beaumont, this year’s winner of AAPG’s Michel T. Halbouty Outstanding Leadership Award.
He also noted that it’s a feeling with which he’s never gotten completely comfortable, even while being able to pinpoint exactly where he was the first time he experienced it.
“The moment I realized people were looking to me for direction and wisdom was when I was AAPG president (2012-13), and I would speak, and everyone would stop talking and listen to what I had to say,” he said.
Beaumont, a senior geologist at Tulsa-based SM Energy Company, said it is a moment that has stayed with him.
Treatise of Petroleum Geology
He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from the University of New Mexico and the University of Kansas, respectively, and is perhaps best known for his work, “Treatise of Petroleum Geology.”
That project, co-written with Norman H. Foster, who died in 1999, was a long time in the making – a very long time.
“The Treatise started 1982, when, as AAPG science director, Norm asked me why the American Association of Petroleum Geologists had never published a book about petroleum geology,” he related.
Beaumont thought it was not only a fair question, but a great one.
“That’s when Norm asked me to join him as a co-compiler of such a book, and it took off from there,” he said.
He had no idea what he was getting himself into. The work entailed more than 30 individual books encompassing three different series: “The Handbook of Petroleum Geology Series,” “The Atlas of Oil and Gas Fields” and “The Reprint Series.”
Though Beaumont and Foster were the driving forces behind the project, the scope of it all was more than two geologists could handle.
“We were helped by an advisory committee of approximately 240 geoscientists from around the world,” he said.
The volumes became a journey and the journey, like all good ones, ultimately returned home.
“The last book in the Treatise that was published, ‘Exploring for Oil and Gas Traps’ (1999), was the book that most resembled the book we originally meant to compile – a book on petroleum geology,” he said.
The Pendulum Will Swing
Beaumont, who has lectured on creative exploration techniques in the United States, China and Australia, has been an integral part of AAPG for years – he has received the Association’s Distinguished Service Award, Honorary Membership and the Award of Special Recognition, as well as serving on the AAPG Executive Committee as the 2007-09 elected secretary – so he has been through the industry’s ups and downs, the machinations, the breakthroughs, the disappointments. He has been instrumental in leading the Association through tumultuous and unsettled times.
“When I was AAPG science director from 1980 to 1984, the society was very focused on advancing the science of petroleum geology and helping the membership be more effective at finding and producing oil and gas,” he said.
At its peak, the science program published more than 40 books per year, more than 100 papers in the AAPG Bulletin and ran dozens of continuing education short courses, schools and field seminars.
That changed.
“Now, the focus seems to have shifted to sustainable energy and away from petroleum geology,” he observed.
The publication program has slowed to one or two books a year and continuing education is oriented to only providing one or two short courses at national and international conferences. There is some disappointment in his voice when he talks about this, but he’s been around enough to know geology’s pendulum, if you will, always swings back.
That’s his hope.
“I expect that AAPG will return to a stronger focus on petroleum geology in the future,” he said.
Why is that?
The answer should surprise no one.
“The oil and gas industry has always been cyclical. Just when the consensus says that we have all the oil and gas we will ever need, demand outpaces supply, and we start into a new upward trend,” Beaumont explained.
And that, he contends, is where the Association generally and its leaders specifically are most needed.
“When that happens, AAPG will begin providing more petroleum geology information to the world again,” he said.
The Sum of His Support
The Halbouty Award, like the Sidney Powers Award, is given to one person each year. But every recipient who has ever won either of them knows that, in some sense, it is a shared award, considering all the professional and personal support a geologist must get to reach this level of recognition.
Beaumont of course mentions his old friend Norm Foster who, he said, taught him how to build and sell oil and gas drilling prospects, but also because Foster helped with something equally valuable.
“Norm got me more involved in AAPG leadership roles,” he said.
Others who provided that support include Dan Hartmann, “who taught me how oil and gas interact with the pores of rocks and how to measure the amount of oil and gas present and producible in those pores,” and John Hobson, his first mentor at Cities Service Oil Co, who showed “me how to be a professional and how to communicate my ideas effectively in talks and papers.”
Over the years, he said, his friends and colleagues Rick Fritz and John Shelton made an indelible mark on his career, generously shared their ideas with him and helped him to evaluate his own findings and conclusions.
As much as anyone, considering his decades of experience, Beaumont is in a unique position to see the skills an AAPG leader should possess.
“I don’t know about the whole oil and gas industry, but I do have an opinion about the kind of leader that AAPG needs to move it forward. He or she needs to understand the application of the principles of petroleum geology to the search for economic accumulations of oil and gas,” he said.
Specifically, he hopes that AAPG restarts publications and continuing education programs.
Beaumont, who is fond of Wallace Pratt’s quote that “oil is first found in the mind,” once said, “Oil and gas-finding is an art that requires a creative flair.”
And how is such creative flair manifested the lives of the oil and gas professional?
“Creativity is a critical element of success in petroleum exploration and production. Companies who aren’t afraid to be different, who embrace new ideas and the risks they bring, are usually the most successful,” answered Beaumont.
He hopes his professional career is remembered for precisely that, he said.