Yeah.

Welcome to the Aaron Harbor show.

Today we are in Houston, Texas at Ceraweek by S&P global.

Welcome to the Aaron Harbor Show.

This is part one of a two par series with Alaskan wild creator Bill Armstrong.

Bill, thanks for joining me here.

And so great to see you again, man.

I imagine the majority of your viewers don't even know what a wild it is.

I think you're right.

You know, that's crazy.

I mean, it's kin of one of those romantic terms.

This is the way I look at it.

So?

So the technical definition of a wildcat.

Or is the guy or gal who goes far away from where everybody else is drilled and drills the well or wells to find a brand new oil field?

It's kind of the tip of the spear in this.

It's the most risky.

It's the riskiest part of the oil business, and it probably has the most reward.

So it's one of those kind of romantic, kind of swashbuckler, kind of pirate kind of deals, you know, our, that.

And so I've been a wildcat in my entire life, and I used to people I grew up learning about, reading about were some of the more famous wildcatters you met T Boone Pickens, right?

Oh, yeah.

Boone was a great friend of mine.

Yeah.

I don't know, up to the day.

Day or.

I don't know if you kno the T. Boone did a show with me.

He did?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Did you like him?

He was fantastic.

Are you kidding me?

Boone is great.

Yeah.

So great.

Wildcatters to me are the the the the true frontier entrepreneurs of the energy business.

Because what you're really doing is you're you're taking greater risks than the rest of the industry that, you know, is focused on stability, even profits, that type of thing.

Right.

And it's it really it's you have to have a certain kin of mindset to be a wild cutter.

Crazy, crazy.

Some people call it crazy.

Some people call it just risk averse.

Some people call it just whatever.

I mean, from the standpoint of like, you have to be comfortable with being wrong becaus you're wrong most of the time.

But, when you are right, you know, it's it's big.

I mean, every industry has their wildcatters.

They just don't call them that.

You know somebody who's trying to develop a new pharmaceutical drug or somebody who's running a new program fo or a new algorithm or whatever.

They're all wildcatters in their own way.

And I just happen to be the the actual wildcat or new oil and gas versus what is the oil and gas industry have such a poor image.

That's such a good question because it's always had a poor image.

I mean, you go back to the time of Rockefeller.

It's always had a poor image and were terrible at kind o pitching our own game to people, because when you're around the oil and gas people, they're great people.

And the vast majorit of the people that get into it are they're just true salt of the earth, fabulous, hardworking, creative, philanthropy people.

That really is that way.

I don't know, maybe there's too much money in it.

Maybe.

Yeah.

I mean, it's certainly the the media tries to alway make us give us the black eye.

I mean, the most recent, you know, thing has been all about climate change and hydrocarbons are bad.

Mean nothing has improved the world more than hydrocarbons.

You you want to find a reason where more people are out of poverty than any other thing is because of hydrocarbons.

It has created wealth for the world.

And without energy, we want to try to live without energy.

Good luck with that.

When you look at the issues of what what energy you know is presented with with concerns about climate change, while at the same time, clearly it's energy that lifts people out of poverty.

The reality is we in the United States, as far as the individual consumer is concerned, pretty much have unlimited energy.

We can plug in whatever we want we can drive wherever we want.

Our clothing is made out of petrochemicals.

Our pharmaceuticals are petroleum based.

I mean, our food is grown.

Yeah.

From, hydrocarbons.

Right.

And, you know, whether it be fertilizer, whether it be plowing, whether it be whatever, I mean, all those activities, everything is based.

And, so, number one it strikes me that the industry does a poor job of simply educating peopl about how Petro chemicals, hydro hydrocarbons are in every aspect of their lives.

Number two is, you know, certainly there are concerns, valid concerns about climate change.

What kind of energy can we go on even though we're using energy more efficiently, the demand for energy is skyrocketing.

Of course it is.

When you look at AI data centers and things like that.

So gimme, gimme your time.

All right.

So you covered a lot of ground there.

And, let me cut a piece apart.

We are unbelievably blessed in our country with energy.

We're the number one producer of oil and gas, and we're the number one in the world.

In a world.

And the number one feature of of gas.

Natural gas in the world.

Oil and natural gas, both.

There's a really good writer.

I'm not sure if you've pay attention to his name, Arjun Murti, if you're listening.

Anyway, he's brilliant guy and he refers to it as the lucky 1 billion of the world that are our.

That has plenty of energy.

And when they say the lucky billion, that's the U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, then you have kind of the impoverished 7 billion which is the rest of the world.

And we're over here trying to dictate to the 7 billion of the worl how they should live their life.

And we're living over here in abundance.

I mean, for the most part, a lot of that part of the world is still, you know, burning wood and dung for their energy.

And so we're over here.

We're an unbelievably blessed.

And so that's the first thing you mentioned.

Second thing you mentioned is all the big concerns about climate change.

You want t talk about the most overblown, ridiculous concerns ever.

It's all about climate change all the time.

Everything you read about pick it up.

I mean, everything is climate change.

Weather's bad today.

Climate change.

It's cold today.

It's climate change.

Hot today it's gonna change.

I just call that weather.

I'm a geologist, and we studied climate when we're studying geology 18,000, 20,000 years ago.

New York City was under 5000ft of ice.

So the the Great Lakes were carved out of those glaciers that were running from north to south across our country.

And that was just 18, 20,000 years ago.

It's been warm.

It's been hot.

And we're in an interglacial period where it's a little bit warmer.

And by the way, if you want a bad world, make it a little colder.

The world needs to be a little warmer.

It really should.

And you know the best way to make the world a better place, more carbon.

So I'm going to say stuff on your show that nobody else will say, yeah, the world needs more CO2, not less, because the world now is 15% greater than it ever was.

And since man's been around.

And it's because of the CO2.

Yeah.

No one's.

You're right.

No one's ever said that on the show.

I know you probably never hear it again, but you know what?

The people that actually do, the analysis, that truly do the work.

That's a true statement.

Certainly we're seein those slowly rising sea levels.

We're going to see probabl significantly rising sea levels.

It's already risen 300ft, 400ft since the last ice age.

So the seas are always going u and they're always going down.

And what was it rising now about a millimeter a year or something?

I mean, it's a pretty tiny little bit amount.

And for the most part, when you see sea level rising, it's because the land is sinking and not the other way around.

So, I mean, listen we can make a huge thing about every little thing.

We're trying to micro analyze things all the time.

And for the most part, it's a way of getting funded.

So do you want to do a research?

Are you going to get research if you go if you go to somebody and say, hey, I want you to to sponsor my research so I can prove to you that climate change isn't real or that nothing's happened or nothing's happening, you know, or I can tell you that the world's better off now than it's ever been, you know, getting funded.

But if you want to make you want to say something.

But it's really scary, you know, you want to talk about, I don't know, pick your scary subject.

That's the way you get funded.

But we are living in the best time in the history of the world, bar none.

It is just really fantastic.

One of the points that I make is if you ask people, if you had the choice of living today versus living 50 years ago, for example.

Who's going to who's going to take 50?

Who's going to take 25 years?

Who's going to take now 15 or 20 years?

Or probably no one, almost nobody.

And certainl if you go back 100 years or 200.

Yeah.

And if you go back three hydrocarbons is a grim place.

Are you in all of the above kind of guy?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

All of the above.

And we should have more nuclear.

We should have more solar.

We should have more wind, and we should have more hydrocarbons because the world needs energy.

It has an insatiable appetite for energy.

And we should really hope to.

The rest of the world gets the type of energy abundance that did to us.

I mean, imagine of the 7 billion unlucky 7 billion.

Think about how many incredibly talented people are in that 7 billion.

Somebody is going to creates a cure for cancer.

Somebody is going to make the best music ever.

You know, the next Monet.

I mean, you have no idea.

And when they're sitting around struggling to make a living just because they don't have any kind of energy, then I think, right.

If you look at the eight, you know, as we head towards maybe 10 billion people, but they're they're under 100 billion right now who have no energy resources at all, which is really I mean, they ar in extraordinarily dire straits.

Then you have another couple billion who have intermittent energy, and then you have, you know, the rest in the, you know, the the groups that have, fair, you know, a fair bit, but not reliable.

And then you have this, you know, folks like us and we take it for granted.

I think one of the challenges is that a lot of people here, who are and understandabl and I think reasonably concerned about environmental issues, don't realize that everyone else isn't like us.

They don't they don't realiz that people are their struggle without energy is a struggle of basic survival.

Yes.

And for us.

So to me morally, for us to say, you know, you can't use hydrocarbons because it's bad for the environment.

To people whose lifespans ar impacted by the lack of energy or who don't have medical car because of lack of access, etc..

I just think it's morally wrong.

I think it's absolutely morally wrong.

And most everybody who is that I know that are in the oil and gas business fell in love with the oil and gas business because they love the environment.

I mean, it really is there's there's probably more kind of closeted environmentalists in the oil and gas business than there are in any other industry because we fell in love with being out in nature and blah, blah.

So that's why I wanted to go study geology.

And, we're all very, ver concerned about the environment.

It's just the extreme which people go to to say that we're damaging the environment, which is it's just for the most part, most part it's nonsense.

And I'm your ratings are going to skyrocket because somebody is brave enough to say that on your show.

One o the things before we leave that, you know, the topic of climate change and different perspectives, how do we how do we get everyone to start talking without and listening to each other?

Because that's not happening the way it used to happen.

Not that it you know, it was all, you know roses and everything years ago, but people used to really they used to cross the aisle.

They used to I know, I know, this is this for thi polarizing world, I don't know.

What is it?

What is it?

Lee is a social media as it's a I don't think it's helped.

I can I can concur with you.

It's hard to, like, even tell somebody who you voted for because you're immediately turned off the other half, right?

If you say no, I voted for, you know, Kamala, you know, well there 50% of you think you're.

I know you didn't, by the way, because I'm not telling you I voted for it.

I already know I hacked the database, that somehow you hacke the database.

So good for you.

And I thought it was also you for it.

It is?

Yeah.

I used to be in high technology.

What should we do?

I mean, you know, you and your wif are extraordinarily charitable.

Care a lot about people, a lot about kids.

But.

And and, you know you're not shy about expressing your opinion, though.

You.

So you don't go out and do it.

You're you're I don't know, you've seen my podcast.

I got a really killer podcast, but it's about wine and football.

Yeah.

It's not about, oil and gas.

Yeah, and it's about wine an football at the same time, too.

Yes.

No, I drink wine while we're talking about football.

Yeah.

There.

Yeah.

You know it's actually a really popular.

I went to SMU, so, you know it's amongst that little crowd of people, see Southern Methodist University, those those who don't know, how do we do a better job?

Because, I mean, I think one of the things, you know, is that the folks on the other side of of opinions to you, and or to me or whomever, they're basically good people, I think, no doubt about it.

And they want I think they want I think we all, most of us want the same things We want a healthy environment.

We want good education for our kids.

We want opportunities for our kids.

We want to be treated fairly, we want to have equal access to whatever opportunities everybody else has.

And I and I think a lot of it I think people support merit based concept in a huge way.

I tell you what, if you could figure that out, you would you could write a bestseller because as our industry, they've been talking about our bad messaging the whole time I've been alive.

I'm 65.

I just turned 65.

They've been talking about our bad messaging my entire life, and we still can't figure it out.

And if you have your way to ge everybody to, let's say I go to I go to lunch and I tell somebody because I have winery in California.

I tell someone, I'm in New Zealand gas business, and they almost call this because they've been s brainwashed.

You're a villain.

I'm a villain, you know.

Well, well, you are anyway.

But that's a different issue.

So that's more personal.

You must have really looked into my Wikipedia.

Doesn't take much.

Doesn't take much.

Yeah, I think I was that I was that profile picture of me in the post office.

I didn' I didn't have to hack anything.

But I do want to talk about your wild cat.

You've had some incredible success.

Especially on the North Slope in Alaska.

Tell me about that.

Tell me, you know what you were able to do that others didn't do.

I grew up in Abilene, Texas.

My dad was a geologist and he was an oil and gas guy.

I, moved to Denver.

Couldn't wait to go bac to Texas somewhat, but to SMU.

Studied geology.

Met my wife.

Geology 101 freshman year, 8 a.m. class.

Being late.

Yeah, she's also a geologist, and she was probably on of the few women in the class.

Yeah, the one very many.

And they're just they're grea people and really smart girls.

And, anyway, we fell love came back to to Denver, and, I went on my own.

I was 24 years old.

Oil was going through the floor at that time because it wa just after the oil crash of 81.

You remember that?

Yeah.

And, there have been so many it's kind of hard to keep track.

Been so many.

It is always a hit or miss.

Yeah.

And a lot of people don't realize how volatile the the industry can be.

I mean, think about any othe industry that when we, let's say when I' doing a deal on the North Slope, you know, it takes me 6 to 10 years before you have first production you find something or you don't or you don't most most of the time you don't.

What's the price of oil going to be in seven years?

Almost every other industry knows, you know, the price of your Honda ca or your Toyota car or whatever.

You can pretty much predict what it's going to be, and it's not going to go down 80%.

No, but the oil business it might be up 20 or down 100, you know, down two words.

You're literally making no money at all.

It's a very difficult industry, even standpoint.

Very, very volatile.

It's not for everybody.

So the oil business inherently is high risk.

I gravitate to the wildcat side of things, which is the highest ris portion of a high risk industry.

I don't know what it i about my personality around it, just I, I have a unique ability to kind of see things in 3D.

And if you're if you're going to find good oil, you better be able t think in 3D just automatically and actually almost in the thinking 4D because you also you had to put a time element to it as well.

And that's always come very naturally for me.

And you know, so I don't kno why I think I was born that way.

And even though I've studied and, you know, was good in school and blah, blah, blah, it wa just something that I had had.

And so I always wanted to go out and explore for something new, kin of looking for buried treasure that nobody else has ever found it before.

And so here's your here's your opportunity.

And I started off doing small deals.

I was a one man company.

I was I actually started above my garage.

You know, you hear about Steve Jobs and Stev Wozniak started in their garage.

I was working that I above my garage.

That's how bad it was.

Oh.

So I was, sort of above my garage.

Had no backing.

I had no money.

No bank would touch me.

No family money.

I didn't have any partners.

I'd married my wife at this point.

She was cranking out kids.

We refer to those years as the years of spending dangerously.

You.

Because.

Because, we probably, probably bet our net worth no less than 30 separate times where you put.

We didn't have a lot of chips.

Yeah, we put them on.

They put it all on the table in a better work, and then you'd try to find a way to get your chips back so you can play again.

It was a very, very exciting time to be alive for us.

And I don't think most people can deal that way, deal with that.

So I started doing small deals and then I found that, man, the best competitors were guys like me.

They're small guys becaus they're scrappy and I love that.

So I started moving away from the, the smaller deals into the areas where nobody else was playing, because the playing field quickly dropped way to almost nobody.

And then the one thin I realized that the people I was playing against, against were major oil companies.

And I will run circles around a major oil company until they pull out the checkbook.

And then I get my ass kicked.

But, when it comes to dealmaking and thinking and strategies, etc., and I can say tha because most every oil major oil company has worked with me one time or another, and we're great friends, I get along with pretty much everybody and so, somewhere about ten years into my career, I started, finding some good luck.

And I started finding this gas fields and a couple Moyle fields.

And I was in jobs in Michigan, and I was in North Dakota, and I was in Wyoming.

I was in Utah and, California.

So did well.

And then along the way, I started picking up really talented people.

Everybody says they have their skills.

I think one of my skills is I can look when I'm showing a deal to, let's say, ten technical people.

Nine of the ten people have no idea what is being pitched even though I'm a good salesman.

But one guy would get it or one girl would get it.

And I just made a point to, like, reference that person's name again.

Because number one, because everybody in the whole business will tell yo that 95% of the oil production is owned by 5% of the people.

And that's a truism.

But it's true.

And so, so along the way, I kind of cherry picked, these people that were really good, geophysical, geological, engineers, land guys.

And, so I kind of created this, like, semi dream team with the first one, but roughly, this probably was by the time I was 40.

Okay.

So I've bee struggling for 20 years.

Yeah.

And then I got these, these people on board, and they knew my style and they knew that I wasn't afraid of afraid of going out and swinging the bat.

And, one of them came to me one day and says, hey, have you ever had an opportunity to look in Alaska?

And I said, no, you know, I know that Alaska.

I know the big fields up there.

You know, Prudhoe Ba is in Alaska, the biggest field because fields, not states.

Prudhoe Bay.

I don't think Pearl Ba makes the top 20 in the world, but it's by far the biggest in the U.S.. Yeah.

Imperial Bay is up there.

And, some other really, really nice fields.

You never hear about it because it was dominated by three players but dominated by Exxon, BP.

And in those days, Arco.

Arco eventually sold to Conoc the land of Atlantic Richfield.

Yeah, they they were one of the ones that found perennial bay Exxon, BP, Arco.

Of course, Prudhoe Bay made the state of Alaska.

When you get right down to it was down in 1968.

They weren't able to, produce i for the first ten years because it didn't have a pipeline.

So they built a Trans-Alaska pipeline, and they finally put it on line in 1977.

And, it immediately went from zero barrels a day of production to 2 million barrels a day.

Incredible, incredible.

In the state of Alaska is very non populated state.

When you get right down to it.

I mean the state of Alaska is an amazing place.

I mean it's huge.

So it's more than twice the size of Texas.

They only have 750,000 people today in that entire state.

Think about that.

That's like a that's like a small suburb of Dallas.

Is the entire population beautiful state gorgeous?

I mean, absolutely gorgeous.

If you ever want wanted, if you want your environmental fix, go to Alaska.

I mean, it's just mountains and the oceans and it's just beautiful.

It's cold.

I mean, you know, I mean, up in Barrow, Alaska, which is on the North Slope, the average high in July, 34 degrees.

So it is a cold river.

I'm not going for the sunshine.

Well, you get the sunshine.

All right.

So so this in the wintertime you got you got six months of darkness in the wintertim it's so far north.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you've been you were at it for over two decades.

Yeah.

Before you look to Alaska and the North Slope is a big, big area.

The North Slope is the size of Montana, which, by the way, is the third largest state in the United States That's just a portion of Alaska.

And so, the majors had, for the most part, wit the exception of ConocoPhillips, have pretty much given up on up there.

And so, I started lookin around, I did some stuff to do, and it was shockingly non picked over.

There was just it's I'm going to get a little bit geo geeky on you here.

But Alaska it from a subsurface standpoint is one of the most quiescent structural things you you've ever seen.

There's almost no any clients racing clients or faulting.

It is just stable stable and geologically stable, geologically stable in the big fields that have been found up there had been found on what few structures they had.

But as you really started studying the fields closely, you realize, well, they thought they were drilling a structural trap, you know, an anticline.

But in reality it was a stratigraphic trap that was like kind of draped over the structure.

So I sort of looked at I sort of turned Alaska apart from the standpoint they, they chasing stratigraphic traps, which, by the way, is probably half of the fields in the world are stratigraphic traps, but they're almost always found by looking for a structure because structures were easy to see.

And stretch trap are extremely difficult to see.

Nowadays with modern 3D seismic technology, you can start to see them a little bit better.

And I kind of went to Alaska with the idea of chasing stretch traps.

About the time the 3D technology started really getting good.

So my timing was really good from that standpoint.

So one of the things you were really good at was you had this ability to look at the data and, and really see it from, you know, not only from a different perspective, but almost in a different dimension.

Yeah, I looked at it from the standpoint.

And this is you have to look at i from a stratigraphic standpoint trap standpoint, and you have to think about that in three dimensions, and you have to have belief in the petroleu Province in Alaska has generated what they call source rocks, a just a ton of oil, gas a ton.

All right.

So in Bush rocks, referring to where the oil and gas originally comes from.

Right.

So the source rocks.

That's the popularity of the Permian Basin.

All the shale plays are essentially people exploiting the source rocks in the US, domestic continental U.S., Permian Basin, western Texas, eastern New Mexico.

Hugely profitable.

Best oil field you could be.

Is that fair to say?

If you're going to be anywhere, wouldn' you want to be in the Permian?

The best secret of that, the Permian Basin and all these shale plays, is they burn through a boatload of capital to get to where they are.

I mean, a ton of those guys have gone bankrupt along the way.

And then once they've been able to wipe out their debt by going into bankruptcy, they're certainly profitable now.

So, the shale game is that's a farce.

And I didn't take I have not heard anyone say that.

Like, let's say going to a huge metroplex with all these skyscrapers.

Rarely, the guy who built the skyscrapers want to make some money is the second owner of the skyscraper.

I mean, you can go through all the companies that you probably talk to these guys, you know, Aubrey McClendon at Chesapeake.

Whiting.

I mean, I can go on and on an on of all these companies that went belly up, they wipe out all their debtors, but they still have all that production from all the money they spent.

And you wipe out your deb all of a sudden it's profitable.

Yeah.

So and and I'm not disparaging angels players that are making the shale plays.

I'm just pointing out the obvious and nobody talks about the obvious.

They spent trillions of dollars, developing these shale plays, whether it's barking, whether it's the Haynesville, whether it's Marcellus, whether it's Permian, it candidates to Montney.

I mean, you go throug there's all these shale plays.

And by the way, the U is essentially the Middle East of shale plays around the world, the best oilfields in the world.

You were going to ask me, what's the best place to be in the Middle East?

If you're gonna chase oil, it's far and away the best place to go.

But the U.S. and Canada i the Middle East of shale plays.

It's just really, really interesting.

We're going to talk about that and more, actually.

And I want to get back to the North Slope.

That's all the time we have for part one of our two part series with Alaskan Wildcatters, Bill Armstrong.

Make sure you watch part two.

I'm Aaron Harbor.

Thanks for watching.

This.

Hi, I'm Aaron, host of the Aaron Harber show.

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