Chapter 43 Working in Ochelata

I got caught in the layoffs of 1989 and misguidedly accepted a job proposal with a small startup company in Ochelata.  Yes, Ochelata, just south of Bartlesville at the turnoff  there by the diner and filling station.  I think there was a filling station there.

 

The company was biotech company used for petroleum exploration.   It was founded by one of the research scientists who had recently been forced into retirement.  As part of the package deal for him to go quietly, Phillips licensed a proprietary surface exploration method based on the microbes in the soil.

I had worked on the project for the last four years or so, and knew the scientist in question.   He had served as advisor to our applied research group as we applied his techniques in the field for the various exploration groups who wanted to use it.  This resulted in me running over great parts of eastern Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado parts of Texas and Saskatchewan, Canada.

I was promised a portion of  the company, which was just one of the many lies that the owners told over the next few years.

I liked the guy, can’t say the same for his son, who was the company president.  I was named Chief Geologist. I was the ONLY geologist.  The mother was the drafts person, the dad, Don was the Director of research and we had a microbiologist and his wife and a variety of local yokels who did lab and field work.

So the leadership of the company was mainly made up of ex-Phillips people and the lab and field people were locals.

 As I said I worked with the method that was called MOST at the Phillip’s research center for five years.  We put a lot of time and effort into developing it and working out statistical methods for processing the data.  We developed a “how to” cookbook so that anyone could train themselves on how to do it, equipment needed, the whole shebang.

My contribution was moving the technique from glass pipets, where we were sucking on glass pipets by mouth to using “Mr. Pipettes” a Japanese invented auto pipet. You see them on CSI now they look like big fancy syringes you use with your thumb.  You press on a disposable plastic tip, depress a plunger with your thumb, and it sucks up a preset amount of fluid.  You squirt it out, the eject the tip with another thumb actuated plunger and you are goo to go again.  Quick, easy and light weight, compared to the weight of glass pipets.  One box of 100 pipets weighted about 40lbs.  100 plastic tips weighted about 12 ounces, the bulk of that was the plastic rack they came in. It meant a lot less crap going to the landfill.

The technique was called MOST and  was patented.  It stood for Microbial Oil Survey Technique.  They gave a release to Don to use it as part of his retirement agreement. He was the inventor but that they gave up some valuable technology shows how badly the company wanted him gone.

Don’s obituary of 2012 says he retired in “the early 1980’s” which is incorrect.  He and I were still at Phillips in 1989 and they pushed him out the same time I got laid off.  The startup company was founded that same year.  He lived to be 85 which is a wonder to me.  The guy smoked like a chimney.  When smoking was still allowed in PPCo buildings he would come down to our offices in the Geology Building at R&D and stand in the hallway and smoke so as to not pollute our offices.  There would be a pile of butts and ashes outside our doors depending on which of us he came to converse.

Both he and his wife had that nicely creased nicotine prematurely aged but well preserved facial skin.

So I started to go to work in Ochelata, running surveys and attending conferences to do marketing and sales.

Through contacts I had with Phillips I arranged to get us some surveys down in Bolivia.  This was work I had actually started while still working at Phillips.  So I ended up going down as a contractor to finish the work.  This led to three different surveys, of increasing size and governmental involvement.

I went down by myself the first time, took three additional Gringos down with me the second and then went alone again by myself to supervise a survey carried out by local teams the third time.

I did get to go to Palau, in the Pacific but that was for an Arizona oil company.  I scuba dived to collect gas samples bubbling up from the sea floor.  That is a story unto itself and I will go into that more detail later.

While at PPCo the field surveys I did took me to a variety of places and opened the door to many of the escapades related in previous chapters.

Working at the smaller company was a bit more boring, as I had gotten married and was faithful to my beautiful new wife.

 I still tromped up hill and dale collecting samples and after a few years I realized that the company was not going to grow and so my stake in the company was not going to increase in value either.   I had taken a salary cut in order to go to work there, and I was rapidly realizing that the company was just a place the son, could play at going to work.

You see, the son was a trust fund baby, who had been endowed with a substantial sum of money by his maternal grandfather who I was told was a muckety muck in old Oklahoma oil.  The boy lived down off of Riverside drive in a somewhat exclusive neighborhood just north of Maple Park, the last big vacant area along the River before you hit down town and where the pedestrian bridge, dam and fountain are located.

The son was somewhat of a “doofus”.  He was the CEO but really didn’t have much of a grasp on anything.   He didn’t need to.  The company could have been a total failure, and he probably would have still benefited, by writing the losses off.   They bought up a good portion of down town Ochelata for some reason, and we were in a trailer and metal lab building on a street east of town.

I served as the marketing person, sales person, survey planning person, field supervisor, report writer and presenter.

One of the things in the way of the company growing was the father was afraid of “Asians” specifically the Japanese getting control of the methodology, and surrounding it with patents.  That is a technique whereby competitors patent all singularly variations of your technique preventing you from modifying or improving it without infringing on their patents.

Anyway, I was trying to get us involved in Asia with some companies and was told no.

I enrolled in law school at the University of Tulsa and began to study law a night.  My wife was expecting our first child and I decided that I could no longer travel abroad as the law school had pretty strict rules on attendance.

This did not seem to be much of an issue till things started to get tense.  I had been particularly put off by what I perceived as willful sabotage of an ongoing research project I had started to try to make our analytical results more meaningful.

Let me explain.

The technique we used was called, MOST standing for Microbial Oil Survey Technique.  It is based on taking soil samples in potentially oil producing areas and analyzing them for the presence of soil metabolizing(eating) bacteria or micro organisms.

You see in nature nothing goes to waste.  If something can be utilized as an energy or food source then nature and evolution provides something that will eat it.  Look at th Giraffe.  Short animals cannot reach the tall foliage on the trees so evolution resulted in an animal that could.  The current Giraffe’s ancestors included a few with long necks, they could eat off the tall branches and were therefore bigger and stronger than their shorter siblings who had to compete with the other more numerous shorties.  Soon the tall Giraffe was getting all the girls and passing his tall genes on to all the baby giraffes that he produced.  Soon the average neck length increased and this went on and on till we see the long necked thing we see today munching on the treetops that no one else can reach.

So bugs as in microbes evolved to eat hydrocarbons.

Numerous kinds exist and numerous kinds of hydrocarbons exist.

So we would sample the soil with the idea the theory that every oil reservoir leaks to some degree.  Rock is not impermeable and under the pressure of all he overlying rock squeezing down on it, some leaks to the surface in invisible micro seeps, usually as one of several forms of natural gas.

In some places in the work, natural gas seeps to the surface and ignites and has formed “eternal flames.”  The Zoroastrian religion of Persia the main religion before Islam conquered the place worshipped these flames and built their temples on top of them.  This was the kind of worship the Liberal Democrats evoked when they put the eternal flame on J. Kennedy’s gave in Arlington.

So you have these invisible seeps, and microbes feed on the associated hydrocarbons. So if you map the microbe concentrations you can map the seeps.

So we would collect samples, culture them in petri dishes (the same kind the culture your strep throat germs in) introduce a specific hydrocarbon and see what bacteria grow.  The technique was designed to be specific to one type that was most commonly related to oil.

Don, the dad advanced the method first invented by some Russian in the 1930’s and made it into a viable tool for use in the field.

There were only a few problems that had to do with time, weight, moisture and willful omission.

Since the technique dealt with living organisms the longer they are removed from their habitat it goes to reason that the total number of viable organisms decreases with time.  The time involved is the delay between sampling and removing them from the ground and getting them to the lab where they are cultured and provided with nourishment to continue to grow and replicate.

Another problem involved weight and moisture.  We weighed each sample and took 25 grams.  Well if the soil was damp, or outright wet the actual amount of soil you were sampling would be less due to the difference between the weight of water in a wet sample vs one in dry sample.  So your initial sample would be biased one way or the other.   This would introduce a lot of noise to the analytic results. 

For example a wet sample containing a lot of microbes would be weighted out and you would only get say 15 grams of soil and 10 grams of water.  A dry sample with few microbes would give you a full 25 grams of soil.  The results after plating, growth and colony counting might be the same or even higher for the sample with fewer actual microbes.  

The last problem was harder to prove and could be due to ignorance but I felt it was willful.  You be the judge.

We would count the microbe colonies in the petri dishes after a week of growth.  In the medium we place a nutrient solution that was toxic to any microbes other than the one we were interested in.  We did two plates of the same dilution and one that was one tenth of the first two.  This allowed us a check.  If one plate was out of sequence 1:1:x10 then would be discarded.  So if one plate had a count of 50 and anther had a count of 55, they were within tolerance.  If the third plate was 5 or one tenth that followed the dilution and everything was right with the world.

However it say one plate was 30 and the second plate was 120 then the 1/10 dilution should tell us which of the two first plates was the correct one.  If it was around 12 the second plate would be retained and the first discarded as an outlier.   The 1/10 plate would be multiplied by 10 giving two plates with counts of 120 for an average of 240 divided by two would give us 120 which would be the value assigned to that map data point.

What I found were obviously incorrect fliers or values that did not correspond to the sequence being included.  Using the second example let’s see the effect on the data.

120 +30+ 12x10) = 290

290 /3 (the number of plates)  =  96

So the end value would be 96 rather than the correct 120 a lower value by 20%.

I saw this going on time and time again.  Even by Don who should have known better and routinely by others including the son.

What this did was bias the data.

Another  thing we had a falling out over was how the data was presented.

A survey might last six weeks or sometime longer.  I looked at those samples taken over the same time period as a single population and evaluated those values with regard to mean values to derive a baseline to determine where anomalous exploration targets might occur.  That is after all what the clients were paying for.

I found that the owners were finding and identifying anomalous values on EVERY LINE of the survey instead of looking at the survey as one or as several discrete populations.

Let me explain.  If we ran a survey and the first two weeks was during a rainy period we were weighing out more water and less soil.  The second two weeks were dry, so the real measured amount of soil went up.  In the final part of the survey, the winter frost had hit and the ground was too hard to dig, except around certain plants (this happened in a survey in eastern Colorado so nearly every sample during that part of the survey was taken at or near ground cactus plants that had sufficiently dried out the soil that it did not freeze and we could dig in the frozen ground.

 Now each of those effects could cause the results to vary, but you could see that and adjust for it by normalizing the data using the standard deviation of the distribution of sample values collected during each period.  Simple and effective.

But no, I had to drag them kicking and screaming to do it.

The science project that was sabotaged was along these lines.  I wanted to take a population of samples from a number of samples and analyze them over time to see how the sample counts decreased over time from the same sample.  All it would take was to plate a few samples every few days to derive a “decline curve” or “death curve” that would define how much sample counts would decrease from the time it was collected to X days into the future.

This would be helpful since we commonly collected samples and they did not get sampled for up to a week after sampling if not longer. Others got sampled and analyzed the same day.

The curve would allow us after enough surveys were sampled this way, to derive a curve that would tell us how low a given sample would be 5 days after it was sampled vs if it had been analyzed the same day.

My efforts were scuttled by the old man when I was out on a project and he failed to count the plated samples he had been asked to count for me.  He could have had someone else do it and did not.  I have no doubt he did it deliberately.  It was something he did not want to address.

 

We never brought up all these intangibles to clients.

In fact the outright lied to clients about the data and what had or had not been done to it.  “Raw” data means unaltered, un-processed data.  The counts taken directly from the lab books was raw data.  But they sent out data that had been averaged and the clients never saw the three plate counts, nor the many spurious data counts included in the averages.

The addressed some of these issues after I left due to the fact that being in possession of their mailing list, I sent out a letter to some 100+ clients detailing all the “what you should know” points I am addressing here.

When I suggested normalizing the data both father and son were against it, since the said “they want us to give them anomalies!”   I had to point out that absence of results is just as useful and even more useful than a map covered with anomalies mapped from bogus data.  It allows you to know where you should NOT waste money drilling.   They felt giving them something even if it was wrong was better than saying “according to our results there isn’t anything there to indicate oil and gas is present.”

Eventually they adopted my methods.  I do not know if they still use them or not.

When I told them I could not travel overseas they tried to fire me with cause 6 months later but I in arbitration.  It was judged as a layoff entitling me to unemployment benefits.  I had to sell my share in the company and it turned out to be worthless, something they designed on purpose.  The company was a shell, all the assets were in their names.  I cashed out for $3000 since my wife was pregnant and they had tied up my unemployment benefits long enough to leave me cash strapped.

Years later I found out they found some other shills to act as their geology face.  One turned out to be a former colleague a section supervisor at PPCo.  He had moved on to  Unocal and had been the president of the Houston Geological Society.  Now retired, he hired on with them for something to do.   He probably brought in a number of additional clients who’s pockets they could then pick.  He authored a few articles touting the technique in the Oil and Gas Journal as well as other trade magazines.

They are still in operation and have moved on to do projects in SE Asia the same place I had proposed going two decades ago.

There are a few tie-ins to my trip to Palau which is covered in the next chapter.

When on my diving honeymoon to the Cayman Islands I met two Canadians looking for investors for a scam.

The scam had to do with a program in Canada similar to what we call CAPEX or capital expenditure.  It has to do with R&D monies being tax deductible.  The two gentlemen were presenting the Canadian program as an out and out scam.  Set up a company in Canada to do R&D, it can be a store front façade or shell company and you can make a fortune off the Canadian government who wants investors to pump R&D money in and create jobs.

I reported this to the company owners, to Don and his son, Doofus and they turned it down, as a nefarious scam. 

 

Ah, but avarice takes time to work, and it took them about 5 years before they succumbed to the jingling sirens call of the money that could be made and became involved in it.  I found out in a roundabout way that I will go into in the next chapter.