Denver geologist John Harms has bookended an award-winning, 50-plus-year career by working recently on a potential shale play, the Anahuac, in Matagorda County, Texas, and on a new massive siliceous carbonates play in the Volga-Urals Basin north of the Caspian Sea.

After graduating with honors from Columbia University in 1951 and obtaining a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Colorado in 1959, Harms was a scientist at Marathon Oil Co.’s research center in Littleton, Colorado, for 20 years. He was a manager of the company’s frontier exploration unit for an additional three. After retiring from Marathon in 1982, he co-founded Harms & Brady Inc., a geologic consulting firm whose clients included E&P companies and institutions such as the World Bank. Much of that work over 20 years was international in scope.

Along the way Harms published more than 30 papers and authored or co-authored numerous proprietary reports. He has received several awards as well, including the Twenhofel Medal from the Society of Sedimentary Geology and Scientist of the Year from the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists.

Harms was an investor and manager in a tech company called Interpretive Imaging, later known as SmartSection, which was eventually bought by Halliburton. He also co-founded privately held DJ Resources. As vice president of exploration there, he helped acquire a large Niobrara position in Colorado that the company sold in 2010 to various other operators. Since then, Harms has continued to consult and acquire additional acreage in the Rocky Mountains, and he holds interests in petroleum companies such as Hillhouse Resources. He also is a partner and consultant to Wavetech Energy Inc.

John Harms

Investor: What kind of work did you do at Marathon?

Harms: One of the main things we looked at was how to explore for oil in detrital rock sequences. They had found a small field in western Nebraska where there were many stratigraphic traps, but they didn’t understand what they had. I was trying to figure out why there was oil in western Nebraska, a couple hundred miles from the source area near Denver. I also tried to influence our geologists to better describe the things they saw in core samples. Everybody does that very well now, but this was 1959!

Investor: What should we be researching today?

Harms: We need to exploit old fields where half of the original oil in place remains, so I think we should research the whole concept of chemical-enhanced oil recovery. There is, of course, C02 flooding now, but that requires a C02 gas source and a big-scale project to be economic. I think there’s room to exploit some of these smaller old fields by chemical flooding, given new technology—but it’s a hard go to get that kind of project financed as yet.

Investor: Why did you become a consultant?

Harms: I had wanted to get Marathon into the mid-Norwegian North Sea—this was in 1982—but the president didn’t want to go there, so eventually I left and started Harms & Brady to pursue a broader range of possibilities. I traveled constantly, mostly working for international oil companies.

Investor: What opportunities exist for smaller players to apply innovations and succeed?

Harms: The SmartSection technology we first developed is widely used. It allows the lone geologist to quickly evaluate lots of data. For example, Niobrara areas in the Rockies that are outside of the D-J may have escaped the attention of bigger players, but are similar to when we first entered the play in the D-J at an early stage.

Parts of Utah are still underexplored. Covenant Field was discovered 10 years ago, but no one has found a sequel yet. Maybe using innovative technology would change that. We are giving that a go on a large acreage block in central-southwest Utah.

Investor: If you could explore anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Harms: I think Russia—without the politics—is a very interesting place to operate. Vladimir Putin himself has recognized that the industry has not done enough on unconventional plays there. The big companies like Gazprom and Rosneft have not done much new exploration lately. There are a lot of older conventional fields there, of course, but there are many remaining opportunities. We are looking at some of the Paleozoic formations that are fine-grained, siliceous and highly organic that merit significant attention.

Investor: What can you tell us about a new shale play in Matagorda County?

Harms: With Hillhouse Resources, we’ve acquired 31,000 contiguous acres on an undeveloped ranch within the Frio Trend there. It was closely held and there hasn’t been much drilling activity since the 1980s, because the family would not lease it. We may seek financing for an exploration program in Miocene and Frio, but we think there’s also potential in the Anahuac Shale—there has been some modest success in the area, but large-scale exploitation is a long way off.

Investor: What advice would you give a young geologist working today?

Harms: I would tell young people that they should get as much varied experience as possible—and do a lot of field work. Know the rocks. Don’t just become computer literate and only see the rocks at arm’s length.

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