[Editor's note: A version of this story that appears in the January 2019 edition of Oil and Gas Investor also previously ran on the site here.]

Legendary oilman Raymond Plank, the founder and retired chairman of Apache Corp., left his mark on a wide range of industry and charitable groups before he passed away Nov. 8, 2018, at his beloved Ucross Ranch outside Sheridan, Wyo. He was 96.

An avid reader to the end, “growth” and “learning” were words he used again and again when Investor last spoke with him in 2012 upon publication of his memoir, “A Small Difference,” which draws on diaries he kept throughout his life. The title refers to advice his father gave him at age 10: always make at least a small—positive—difference in people’s lives.

Plank did that in spades. His remarkable oil and gas career, spanning more than 50 years before he retired in 2009, enabled him to grow Apache to thousands of employees, touching lives over the years from Canada to South America and Australia and from the Rockies, West Texas, Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast to the North Sea and Egypt.

Simultaneously, he endowed and influenced support for many philanthropic endeavors that make a difference in the lives of communities, such as founding the Fund for Teachers, which provides summer travel and enrichment grants to kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers and founding schools for girls in Egypt.

He also presided over the launch of Apache’s celebrated “1 Million Trees” program that awards grants of trees to nonprofits—such as Boy Scouts—throughout the U.S. for public planting. The 14-year-old program’s initial goal was 1 million trees; it’s now at more than 4 million and counting, all in public spaces and in 17 states.

Born in 1922 and raised in Minneapolis, he was at Yale when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted and joined B-24 bomber pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific during World War II, flying 40 combat missions and earning a Bronze Star. Three of the planes he piloted never flew again, barely making it back and being so damaged they were scrapped for parts.

After the war, Plank returned to Yale, graduating in 1946 with a bachelor of arts, majoring in international relations, and returned to Minneapolis where he soon formed a small bookkeeping, tax and accounting firm.

He and two friends, Truman Anderson and Chuck Arnao, formed Apache in 1954 with $250,000 and flipped a coin to determine who would be president: Plank won, and the rest is history. Today Houston-based Apache’s market cap is about $13 billion, and net cash provided by operating activities in third-quarter 2018 was $1 billion.

The E&P’s 2019 production is projected to hit at least 400,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, with more than half of that from the Permian Basin.

Coming from a financial background, Plank was always creative. In 1956, the nascent Apache offered its first oil and gas drilling fund and was an industry leader in that popular format until it dropped annual drilling-program sales in 1986. In 1981, the company created the first upstream MLP, but it was the first to leave that structure when oil and gas prices collapsed and tax laws changed in that decade.

In the early ’80s, when acquiring another E&P, Plank devised what was a unique deal structure at the time—the buyer was protected if commodity prices fell, but the seller got upside if they rose. This structure became a case study at Harvard Business School. Years later, Plank endowed the Raymond Plank Professorship of Global Energy Policy at Harvard, following his lifelong interest in international affairs.

Apache went public in May 1969, and it grew steadily by making large, savvy deals throughout the ’80s and ’90s, including a few corporate mergers and many more asset acquisitions, including from Amoco Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Repsol SA, Texaco Inc. and Occidental Petroleum Corp.

“Raymond was a pioneer in the acquire-and-exploit strategy that ultimately transformed the U.S. E&P business,” recalled George Solich, who for more than a decade was Apache’s business-development chief and is now CEO of FourPoint Energy LLC. “We moved from an industry that, at the time, was dominated by major oil companies to one driven by independents.

“I remember him telling us ‘One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.’ Looking at the shale revolution today, he couldn’t have been more right!”

At one time, the company was the largest gas producer in the Anadarko Basin and had the largest operated position on the Gulf of Mexico Shelf. Apache also began venturing abroad in 1988, at one time holding concessions or production in Canada, Poland, China, Australia and Argentina’s Vaca Muerta Shale. It later retrenched to a U.S. focus on the Permian, remaining in Egypt and, at press time, announcing another significant discovery in the North Sea.

Plank received much recognition and had served on numerous civic, charitable and industry boards. He was honored as CEO of the Year three times by the Wall Street Transcript, and was named among Hart Energy’s “100 Most Influential People of the Petroleum Century,” a special report published in 2000.

People said he was irascible, frank, passionate and a force of nature. He was always interesting, always outspoken and always advocating for U.S. producers at the state and federal levels. During the severe gas-price disruptions of the ’80s, he called for a gas producers’ co-op similar to what the Florida orange growers had. He also lobbied successfully against the federal fixed-gas-price system of the time.

Plank’s many interests included studying history and politics, supporting the arts and the environment, and fishing, hunting and flying his plane. In 1981, he created the Ucross Foundation on his 20,000-acre working ranch in northeastern Wyoming: A group of old ranch buildings was restored to become a conference center, hosting an artist-in-residence program. Several Pulitzer Prize, Tony and National Book Award winners are among those who have stayed there.

But service to others was a cornerstone of his life, always leading to hands-on philanthropy. Among the many charitable causes he created, Apache built 203 one-room schools for young girls throughout Egypt, and, in 2001, he endowed the Fund for Teachers, which has supported more than 5,000 U.S. teachers with stipends and sabbaticals.

The diary he kept from age six formed the basis of his aforementioned memoir, which detailed his childhood, war service, education and how he grew Apache through diversification into real estate and other industries but always circled back to focus on oil and gas. In “A Small Difference,” Plank described key deals and decisions that made the company, the politics of management transitions along the way, the pros and cons of acquire-and-exploit vs. drilling big discoveries, and his life philosophy.

“When I was really young, I sold eggs from our family farm,” Plank recounted. “Later on, another kid and I dug a ditch from a guy’s service station, when we were about 14, I think. He used a hose to move oil—and water that was used for washing cars—down into the ditch and it defiled the environment.

“Today, I think people recognize increasingly that they have a responsibility to the environment, and that that is part of the higher cost structure of doing business … and we have to be able to do it at a price of $50 or $70 a barrel.”

That environmental stewardship continues at Apache even today, as the company annually donates thousands of trees across the U.S.

“It’s not about what we get; it’s about how we get it and how we use it,” he wrote. “It isn’t what we inherit or pursue; it’s about whether and how we elect to grow. It’s been a superior life and it’s continuing,” he told Investor in 2012.

“Lifelong learning is so important. If I weren’t learning I wouldn’t be around, because it’s my mind which allows me to still get around. I’ve probably read 1,000 books so far this year.”

[SIDEBAR]

IN PLANK’S WORDS

“My suggestion is colored by my experience, but at the outset you have to understand the importance of having a plan. I had done a lot of planning before I started Apache. You front-end-load your ambition with your considerations and what you hope to accomplish, otherwise you’re like a milk-bottle top bumping along the banks of a creek.

“But the plan is not worth much if you can’t make decisions, and you have to be able to adapt, like Eisenhower did in World War II. Adaptability to changing circumstances is very important. It’s kind of like when you have your first kid—you’ve got to learn how to be a parent.

“Get your thoughts in order on the culture you have in mind and live by that. Now you are in the midst of a revolution, so how do you intend to approach that? I do believe the reserves are there, we’ve got 100-year reserves. I believe those reserves are technologically proven to exist and also in other places in the world. It shouldn’t be held hostage by those seeking their own moment in the sun ….

“We can contribute a great deal more and the country would do better. Very high oil prices are the enemy of a robust economy, but they don’t have to be. The devil’s in the details …. The opportunity in energy is so great … but you can’t have compromise.

“What do you want to do? Compromise technology, integrity, reality? You need to bring this issue into the category of education, and a spirit of collaboration.”

—Excerpted from “A Small Difference” and selected interviews with Oil and Gas Investor through the years.

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