Enhanced oil recovery doesn't typically attract private-equity dollars, but Legado Resources LLC is an exception. Among the EOR specialists at the Woodlands, Texas-based company is Jennifer Burton, senior geologist.

Burton spent more than a decade at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., including five years in the Alaska exploration group doing "truly rank frontier exploration" in the Brooks Range Foothills, including month-long field seasons collecting rock data and making maps the way the early explorers did centuries ago, in her words "a geologist's dream." While working Alaska, she also was the on-site geologist for Anadarko's first operated well on the North Slope and did the company's participation assessment for the Fiord project, now a multimillion-barrel satellite of Alpine oil field. Earlier in her career, she was a development geologist, drilling numerous wells in West Texas, and then working exploration on the emerging Bossier gas play.

After Alaska, Burton joined the company's EOR group as G&G supervisor. Heading up the effort was Dane Cantwell, now a principal at Legado, an EnCap Investments-backed venture. The team did technical studies for CO2 floods at Salt Creek and Monell fields in Wyoming, which are among the largest EOR projects in the U.S. Using CO2 from Exxon's LaBarge Field, these projects alone reversed the state's decades-long oil decline.

Eighteen months later, Anadarko asked Burton to join the corporate strategic planning group. The group worked directly for CEO Jim Hackett analyzing the economics of portfolio projects. The move to strategic planning helped prepare Burton for the higher-stakes atmosphere of a private firm, "where there is a greater professional risk-and-reward scenario."

Burton then served a brief stint in Anadarko's Brazil group, before joining Griffis & Associates, an A&D firm, as vice president of geosciences. After a year, the need for more time at home as her family grew led her to Legado, first as a part-time consultant, then joining the company in September 2009.

A native of Tennessee, Burton majored in geology at the University of Memphis and earned her master's from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She sits on the board of the Houston Geological Society, also serving as Educational Outreach director and on the Earth Science Week committee. And she leads her eldest son's Cub Scout pack.

Recently, Burton discussed the unique aspects of EOR investments.

Investor: What's the attraction of EOR for private-equity firms?

Burton: EOR is a unique skill set—there are just a handful of people and companies in the U.S. that do it. Backing teams with proven EOR execution capability gives private-equity firms access to very large, lower-risk oil reserves. These often provide a commodity hedge for their portfolios, which are increasingly composed of companies focused on gas plays or higher-risk, emerging exploration projects.

Investor: What limitations are there in EOR?

Burton: We all believe EOR will be a bigger part of the energy future, but there is uncertainty about how CO2 will be regulated and treated, and how EOR fits into the whole concept of carbon-capture-storage technology. This puts projects that require a joint carbon-capture-storage (CCS) and EOR relationship in a holding pattern. The economics have to work for both.

Investor: What are the prospects for using anthropogenic CO2?

Burton: It's emerging—but it's not at the point of wide-scale commercial applicability yet. It's something that those of us in the business are keen on doing, but you have to have the right quality of CO2 and work out a lot of logistics.

Investor: What's your current EOR project?

Burton: In the Permian, we have just completed the first phase of injection at the Goldsmith Landreth San Andres Unit (GLSAU), a 75-million-barrel EOR target in West Texas. Initially discovered in 1935, this field was largely at the end of its life cycle, having exhausted most of what could be recovered through primary and secondary recovery.

The beauty of this field and others like it is that they still have a lot of residual oil that CO2 can uniquely access. Since acquisition in 2008, we've increased production from 200 barrels per day to more than 900 barrels per day, forecasted to ultimately exceed 10,000 barrels daily, doubling peak rates achieved during waterflood. We've been injecting CO2 since we initiated a pilot project in August of 2009. Large-scale expansion began in January of this year.

Investor: You've also done some work in unconventional oil plays.

Burton: Yes, on the Marmaton formation, in the Oklahoma/Texas Panhandle. It was an old vertical well play that we redeveloped with horizontal well technology. The play created enough intrigue that we got an offer from Unit Exploration, which bought us out. We did detailed core studies and petrophysics and applied some formation microimaging to work out a depositional and fracture model. It led us to some different ideas about how to target and develop fracture plays.

Investor: So where's the next unconventional oil play?

Burton We see many opportunities. It is probably best to say that, just as in our EOR approach, we are leveraging off our knowledge—looking for the next best thing.

—Susan Klann

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