Harold Korell attended his last annual meeting as chairman of Southwestern Energy Co. on May 20 and boarded a plane with wife Pat to Athens for a Mediterranean cruise, reporting, “I see the Acropolis and Parthenon. Amazing for a country boy from Wyoming.”

Korell began to dial down his day-to-day leadership of Southwestern as CEO in 2008 after an already 40-year career that began in Bakersfield, Calif., for Mobil Corp. and led to a job near his alma mater, the Colorado School of Mines, in Tenneco Oil Co.’s Rockies division. Under Korell, who joined Southwestern in 1997 as COO, Southwestern discovered the Fayetteville Shale play in north-central Arkansas that grew to production of 2.6 billion cubic feet of gas a day.

Upon passing the CEO role along to Steve Mueller, who is now chairman, Korell combined his passions for real estate and travel by buying a boat, sailing for three months each summer between Victoria, British Columbia, and Alaska.

From homes in Houston, Montana and elsewhere, he remains busy with family and friends and with serving on the board of trustees of the Baylor College of Medicine and on the board of governors of the Colorado School of Mines. “As of last week, I am, for the first time in my life, not involved in a role of creating value for an E&P company,” he reported from Turkey. “We will have to see where this leads.”

Oil and Gas Investor visited with Korell on his outlook for the industry.

Investor: What's a play that you would still like to see figured out?

Korell: I might want to figure it out myself; I might have one more run left in these shoes! I do remain fascinated by the hydrodynamic trap we, at Tenneco, found in the Big Stick and Four Eyes Fields in North Dakota in 1978.

Investor: Do you feel you were advantaged in your career by working some international plays?

Korell: With Tenneco, I was able to work side by side with some of the best technical minds in the business and participate in discussions of projects all over the world. After Tenneco, with American Exploration Co., we were in places like Oman, Tunisia, Australia, New Zealand and Canada; frankly, these were where we should not have been. I had also worked on coalbed-methane projects in Poland and Hungary. As a result, I kept my nose close to the ground in North America at Southwestern, where I could see a higher probability of creating present value.

Investor: What are some of the threats today to onshore U.S. monetization of hydrocarbon resources?

Korell: To both the U.S. and the world, it is the threat of not being able to realize the tremendous economic and environmental benefits of our recoverable oil and gas reserves. It is due to the outright ignorance of those who oppose the development of these resources on the single premise that mankind is the primary driver of so-called “global warming.” Earth has been warming for at least 10,000 years; otherwise, we would still have glaciers covering a large part of the planet.

We are likely contributing to warming but, if the world’s population continues to grow and more of the population wants a quality of life like that of the upper 20%, then we must come to grips with the energy that is needed for that.

The progress industry has made in my lifetime in natural gas recovery is unprecedented, and it is a gift to civilization in the form of an energy source that fits beautifully with solar and wind. Our children and grandchildren are being educated in today’s school of thinking that the only acceptable form of energy is “alternative energy.” We need to educate young people about physics, chemistry and economics such that they have the tools to put “alternative energy” in scientific and environmental balance with reality: Alternative energy does not solve the problem alone; we will be dependent upon hydrocarbons far into the future. We just need to develop them in a responsible manner.

Investor: What is your advice for industry newcomers?

Korell: At my final annual meeting as chairman of Southwestern this past week, I challenged our young people to think big, to assume they can contribute to a paradigm change in their careers, to use their knowledge and creativity to make a difference and to not assume that the way things are is the way they have to be.

I reminded them that, at one time, Southwestern’s market cap was about $200 million and, today, it is approximately $17 billion—an 85-fold increase. I asked them to imagine an 85-fold increase on $17 billion; that would amount to a market cap of $1.445 trillion!

Those who choose to drive in the middle lane of the interstate forever will only find themselves in the middle of the pack. Get off the road well-traveled and make your career an adventure worth living.

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