Al Whitehead

Al Whitehead has been wildcatting all over the world, and today he is still at it. He just formed another small family company, Canyon Springs Resources, which plans to drill one operated well in Wyoming this year near the South Dakota border.

He most recently served as chairman, president and CEO of Empire Petroleum Corp. from April 2002 to January 2015 and was its principal financial officer as well. Control of this public company was recently sold to an investor group in Denver.

Whitehead began his career in the oil business with Union Oil of California in Midland, working throughout West Texas as a landman. He had graduated from Eastern New Mexico University with a B.A. in business administration in 1955 (interrupted by two years of service in the U.S. Army in Korea), when a friend at Unocal helped him get the job. He and his wife have donated generously to the university in the past few years.

After a subsequent stint in Calgary with one of T. Boone Pickens’ early E&P companies, in 1963 he co-founded Bridger Petroleum Corp., also based in Calgary. It was backed by New York family money, including from the Marx Toy Co., which made the famous plastic Big Wheel tricycles so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Bridger originated and explored for oil and gas prospects in Canada and the U.S. and participated in exploration projects in Turkey, Indonesia, the Persian Gulf, the North Sea and Argentina. He was CEO of Bridger until 1978, when it was sold for $68 million to Home Oil, at the time one of Calgary’s biggest independents.

In 1979 he returned to the U.S., settling in Tulsa. During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, he was the co-founder, CEO or director of several public and private E&Ps, including Bonanza Oil and Gas Ltd., Cimarron Petroleum Corp., Garnet Resources Corp., Seven Seas Petroleum Inc. and Coastal Energy Co.

Investor: Why did you enter the oil industry?

Whitehead: A good friend was the assistant division landman at Union Oil and he got me in. I was buying leases within a month even though I didn’t know much about it; I’d get out there and those farmers would start asking me fancy questions I couldn’t answer, so I’d call back to the office like they’d told me to do. It was sink or swim. I was getting leases, getting permits to do geophysical work and settling claims—it was a good learning curve.

Investor: How did you transition to working in Calgary for 20 years?

Whitehead: My friend Lawton Clark was hired to work for Boone Pickens in Amarillo … and guess who got to go to Amarillo with Union Oil? I was there about six months when Boone approached me, and he started talking about going into Canada. I said I’d join them only if I had an opportunity to go to Canada. I loaded up the family in 1959 and we went to Calgary … I loved it up there. But I left Boone after a short while and in 1963, I formed a company that eventually became Bridger Petroleum, which drilled close to 100 wells a year in Canada, mostly shallow gas.

We drilled only the second well ever drilled in the Hudson Bay area. We had to land up there on a sea plane, it was so remote. We cored the whole well, but the sea plane wasn’t big enough to carry all the core back to Winnipeg, so I hired two guys to stay there; they checked the ice every day until it was thick enough to support a plane to land on it and pick up all that core.

Investor: Why did Garnet go into Colombia? What is it about international that intrigues you?

Whitehead: We anticipated finding larger reserves and at that time it was fairly unexplored. We drilled three or four exploration wells there. It was pure jungle. What we had to do to get the oil out would blow your mind: We had to barge it out on trucks across a river. We were operating straight into the FARC-dominated area, and one of our guys was kidnapped … we negotiated back and forth and eventually we got him back for $15,000. It was wild.

Investor: You are a true wildcatter.

Whitehead: I enjoyed the thrill, but not anymore. At one time we had drilled in Spain, Australia, the Malacca Strait, Colombia, Papua New Guinea. It’s exciting, especially when you’re 100 miles away from the nearest production. But the odds are way against you.

Investor: So it’s back to Wyoming.

Whitehead: That’s a shallow play, about 4,600 feet, to the Canyon Springs Formation, which is what I named my company. It’s in the far northeast corner about 10 miles from the South Dakota border, so it’s pretty much a wildcat. The zone we’re going after produces in the area, about 10 miles away.

Investor: Are you going to be there during drilling?

Whitehead: I probably will, because I didn’t go up to the last one. We drilled a well about six miles north of this one and got a dry hole, but this time we feel we’ve learned more from our data—I just hope we learned enough!

Investor: What sort of advice do you glean from your career?

Whitehead: You’ve got to pay very close attention to finances. If you’re wildcatting, make a very close estimation of what it will really cost you, and make sure you have the money.

You know, there are very few guys built for wildcatting, it’s such a risky business.

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