Many a retired executive stays busy with philanthropy and other pursuits, and Forrest Hoglund is no exception. He jokes, “My mother must have raised a dummy—I have three non-paying jobs right now.” He divides his time between Dallas and Houston.


He was, until May 2008, the chairman of Forest Oil Corp., helping to engineer the Denver company’s recent strategic turnaround. To this, he brought experience as the former chief executive officer of a large independent, Texas Oil & Gas Corp. (known as TXO), and later as chairman and CEO of Enron Oil & Gas Corp. When the latter was spun off by its parent and renamed EOG Resources Inc., he left to “do a bunch of different things versus being involved primarily in one company.”


Today he heads up a $155-million fund-raising effort to build the Perot Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas, which will include “the best ‘energy hall’ in the world.” Ground-breaking is planned for 2009 and completion in 2011. It will enable visitors to go down in a horizontal Barnett shale well while it is fraced. Hoglund succeeded in a similar campaign when he headed the committee that built and funded the Weiss Energy Hall in 1995 at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science.


The University of Kansas grad is also vice chairman of a Houston group that has developed a “fun, animated, Internet-based math program called ‘Reasoning Mind’ for third- to sixth-graders that is getting dramatic results.”


But natural gas is always on his mind. He was head of Arctic Resources, which, as he explained on “60 Minutes” in 2003, wanted to build a gas pipeline offshore Alaska, from Prudhoe Bay to the Mackenzie Delta, to hook up with a proposed Canadian pipeline. Both pipelines are yet to be built. Now, a liquefied natural gas project is on his mind as co-founder, chairman and CEO of Sea One Maritime Corp.


Investor Tell us about your LNG endeavor.
Hoglund We’ve developed new technology to make LNG offshore, which we think will open up lots of opportunities—first, to bring smaller volumes of gas to market, and eventually bring larger volumes at less cost.

Investor How is it different?
Hoglund Instead of building a huge liquefaction plant onshore—that is very expensive—we use a barge offshore to clean the gas, then we use propane as a solvent and cool the gas to -40 degrees, under pressure. We then fill a ship that is essentially a floating pipeline with the resulting mixture of natural gas, liquids and propane. We call it “LNG Lite.”

Investor What are the advantages?
Hoglund When you get it to market, you only need another barge with a gas plant on it, to separate the gas and liquids from the propane, sell the gas and liquids, and recycle the propane. Compared with a traditional liquefaction plant, it costs about half as much and you use only a third as much energy to make the LNG Lite. It has tremendous flexibility—just move the barge and ships to the next source of gas when you’re finished.
We have ABS approvals in principal, and we should send out for bids on the FEED (front-end engineering and design) in 2009. I kiddingly say this effort is somewhere between a giant sinkhole and a great success. We’re in that first stage of spending the money now—it’s all private funding at the moment. People are very interested because they like the low-cost and efficient aspect of it. It’s the green answer for moving gas today.

Investor How did you come up with this idea?
Hoglund In our prior work on the Alaskan gas pipeline project, we had a eureka moment. This technology was mentioned in the scientific literature but it had not been patented yet, and evidently nobody put any commercial value to it.


Investor Don’t you worry about a gas glut in North America?
Hoglund We’re most likely not going to be bringing this gas into the U.S. This will be more international—to Europe, South America or Asia.


Investor The Alaskan-pipeline project failed to take off. Do you think anything else will ever get done?
Hoglund There is no question that the route we were pushing was best, offshore ANWR and picking up Canadian gas, and it did not cross any mountain ranges. But nobody was willing to buck the state of Alaska. Now the higher-cost, $30-billion route south through Alaska is being talked about. I don’t think it’s going to be built for a long time. There is no market for high-priced gas.


Investor So it’s on to the shale plays?
Hoglund Gas from shales is a big deal. If these work as people think they will, there’s going to be a lot of gas and a lot of players. The majors probably will try to get a piece of it. But it probably takes a bit higher gas price than we have now. We’ve survived low gas prices before, but it’s different this time because we’re having the worst worldwide economic reaction ever—at least in my lifetime. When the gas-rig count comes down—and it will—and you have a 50% decline rate in gas wells, the market will correct itself fast.


Investor Ever wish you were still drilling?
Hoglund Yes and no. I took over as chairman of Forest Oil in 2003 and we did quite a turnaround—we got the stock up fivefold at one time. But I left in May 2008 because I had to spend more time at Sea One.
At this stage, I’ve reached perfect balance in my life. I spend half my time working for non-profits. As for the other half, half may turn out to be not for profit, but the other half is doing quite well.

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