Dick Stoneburner
Editor's note: This profile is part of Hart Energy's 50th anniversary Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers of the past 50 years and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
A geologist, Dick Stoneburner had been exploring the Lower 48 since 1977 when his company, Petrohawk Energy, decided in the summer of 2007 to develop unconventional-resource plays.
The E&P was in Arkansas’ Fayetteville gas play already by virtue of a merger and it was drilling the Cotton Valley, overlying Haynesville shale, in northwestern Louisiana.
Stoneburner, COO of Petrohawk, went to a conference that same week and returned to headquarters with the idea of a horizontal Haynesville play based on a core he saw there of a vertical Encana Corp. test for 4 MMcf/d.
“Imagine what it will do horizontally,” he said of his thinking at the time. By year-end 2008, Petrohawk’s first 10 operated Haynesville horizontals’ IPs averaged 19.3 MMcf/d.
And the company wanted another play.
In early 2008, in the midst of leasing for a larger position in the Haynesville, Stoneburner turned to Gulf Coast geologist Gregg Robertson, whose father had mapped the Austin Chalk overlying the Eagle Ford from Mexico to Mississippi in the 1970s.
In October 2008, Petrohawk reported the horizontal Eagle Ford discovery, STS 241-1H, with an IP of 9.1 MMcfe and delineated its 150,000 net acres across 30 miles in La Salle and McMullen counties with just four additional wells.
Stoneburner said, “If ever there is a classic from-A-to-Z shale-exploration story, there’s not a better one out there.... From the first thought in January 2008 to having a producing, commercial discovery in October and more than 150,000 acres put together in that short period of time, that’s just how far the understanding about shale had evolved.
“Everything just fell into place.”
Formed in 2003 with $60 million, Petrohawk was purchased in 2011 by BHP Billiton for $15.8 billion. Today, the Eagle Ford play produces 1.1 MMbbl/d and 7.5 Bcf/d of gas.
After Petrohawk’s sale, Stoneburner stayed with the team as president of BHP’s new North American shale production division. After this, he joined several E&P boards of directors and did a formal stint as a teacher, one of his passions, as the distinguished lecturer of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
He had been a managing director for Pine Brook Partners and continued on as a senior adviser.
Today, he co-leads development of shale-gas resources in northern Australia as chairman of Tamboran Resources, enlisting co-investor Bryan Sheffield, who built and sold Permian Basin E&P Parsley Energy, as well as U.S. land driller Helmerich & Payne.
“What Tamboran is uniquely situated to do is to provide what very well could be a high-volume resource with time,” he told Hart Energy. “This is going to supply not only the Australian domestic market, but it’s perfectly situated to provide the Asia-Pacific region with much more competitive LNG.”
Looking at Tamboran’s #1 Tanumbirini vertical discovery’s logs reminded him of his early looks at what became enormous U.S. shale plays.
“While I was visiting them in Sydney in 2014. I looked at the log and, about a year later, saw the core analysis from Core Lab and the report from Netherland Sewell [& Associates] on the resource potential.
“The long and short of it is that, from a purely petrophysical standpoint and an original gas in place standpoint, this resource is comparable to the best resources in North America.”
—Nissa Darbonne, Executive Editor-at-Large