Low natural gas prices have caused privately held Ward Petroleum Corp. to hit the pause button on deep-gas drilling in the geologically complex Anadarko Basin in western Oklahoma. But chairman Lew Ward isn’t one to sit still for long in Enid, where he founded the company with his geologist wife, Myra, 47 years ago.

They met on a blind date at Oklahoma University, where he studied petroleum engineering and she majored in geology. After graduating in 1953, he went to Dallas and Delhi Gas, and she left for Tulsa to work at Oklahoma Natural Gas Co. They married in 1955 and in 1956, moved to Enid to join her oilman father, Carl Gungoll. In 1963, he and Myra formed L.O. Ward Operations, predecessor to the current company.

Ward Petroleum has drilled more than 800 wells, some to 23,000 feet. At one time, it had 300 employees and well-service, trucking and gas-marketing subsidiaries, but in the middle 1990s he sold these to focus on deep-gas exploration.

Ward has never had a layoff, and several employees have been with him 20 years or more. Three times, Inc. has named Ward Petroleum to its list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.

Son Bill, a petroleum engineer graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, took over daily operations in 1996 and runs the company from Fort Collins, Colorado. Daughter Casidy also has a degree in petroleum engineering. And a grandson is currently researching biomass and wind opportunities.

Ward has been active in many national oil and gas organizations and numerous civic and charitable ventures in Enid. In 1996 he became chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and in 1999 was honored with its Chief Roughneck Award. In 2009 he received the Trailblazer Award from OU, given to exceptional individuals in the energy industry. He is on the board of The Nature Conservancy, the National Petroleum Council, and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which is finding shipwrecks offshore Turkey. And he chairs the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center, which honors the pioneers who, through hard work and hope, settled northwest Oklahoma.

Investor: Lew, how did you start your business?

Ward: Myra’s dad offered us the opportunity to join him. I was doing engineering, but while working with him, I also learned how to buy and sell leases. We bought a lease one time that she had mapped, an outcrop of the Chester formation…no one wanted it until someone else drilled a good offset well nearby. We decided to drill the lease ourselves on Myra’s geology, and we made a well—that gave us our start.

Investor: As chairman of Ward Petroleum, what is your role now?

Ward: I’m there to ask the right questions (mostly about my great-grandchildren!) and get answers if anybody else has a question.

Investor: What projects are you involved in?

Ward: We have one rig drilling. Normally we’re drilling three or four deep-gas wells at a time, but the decline in gas prices pretty much represents the decline in our drilling budget, since we drill on cash flow.

Investor: Are you in the wash plays?

Ward: Yes, we’re looking in the Granite Wash, and the Tonkawa sand is responding well to horizontal drilling.

Investor: You’ve always focused on gas, but what about oil plays?

Ward: We’re trying to find good oil prospects, but where we’ve typically been working is deep, so most of it is gas. We are casting a wistful eye on the Bakken…and we are buying some acreage in the Niobrara play in northern Colorado. Our guys there are listening to what is happening in that play. They are well-positioned and have the thrill of the hunt—and that is good hunting ground.

Even though there’s a generation gap, there are a lot of 25-year-olds coming up, and all of them are bright.

Investor: What advice did you give your son and others starting in the oil business?

Ward: One thing I emphasized is, there are many opportunities out there, and to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

Investor: Did you have to do that?

Ward: Yes. One stumbling block we had in the 1980s was a real enigma: We had drilled several significant gas wells and had a large volume of gas…but we ran out of drilling partners because we couldn’t sell the gas. We had to find a group that had a market and needed the gas, otherwise, our partners would not come in (we usually took 20% working interest in all that we did).

We found a group with a market and they furnished half the money, we furnished the gas and the other half of the money, and we jointly built a pipeline to the marketplace. We were able to sell not only our gas, but other companies’ gas, too. That was the start of Ward Gas Marketing Co. It has morphed into a partnership with Frontier Gas Services.

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