Floyd Wilson
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.
Floyd Wilson said he’s still active in the business, in a quiet way.
“I’m not operating any wells, but I have some interests here and there,” said Wilson, who founded Petrohawk, a pioneer in shale exploration in the mid-2000s. “When you start these things, whether it’s a company or a play, it’s all about risk taking … and I still like that.”
Wilson said he didn’t have a hometown. He was part of a military family and grew up on different Army bases. When he graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in industrial engineering, he wasn’t planning on a career in the oil and gas industry.
In the early 1970s, he began working for an energy company as a completion engineer, and decided, even though he “didn’t know very much,” to start his own gas and oil operating company in 1976. He grew the company and eventually sold it. Then repeated the process, learning the business as he went along. Petrohawk was Wilson’s sixth company, formed in 2004.
Up until then, all of Wilson’s enterprise had been traditional—acquiring reserves and drilling small wells. Then, in 2007, Petrohawk decided to sell all its assets and go big into shales.
“I don’t say ‘I’ too much,” he said. “It was great that I could interest some other great individuals to work with me, and we saw a whole new scale of types of wells that we had never seen before.”
Working over a large area meant the risks shifted from digging a dry hole to mechanical and execution problems. Petrohawk started with the Fayetteville shale, then moved into the Haynesville. The company’s senior geologist Dick Stoneburner heard from his connections in South Texas that the largely unexplored Eagle Ford shale showed promise.
Floyd said his team quietly amassed about 200,000 acres, dug a couple of test wells 50 to 60 miles apart and found some excellent gas production. They began digging more wells to exploit the gas, then heard that other companies had found oil.
“When we drilled our first well in the oily window of the Eagle shale, it was shockingly good,” he said. Petrohawk expanded in the area again, and in 2011 agreed to a $15.8 billion deal with BHP.
It was, Floyd said, a pretty good payday for “someone who grew up on an Army base.” The founder formed his companies on the made-to-sell model, as he preferred getting the big payoff for himself and his team.
After the sale of Petrohawk, Floyd worked with several other startups into the latter 2010s. Now he says he keeps track of his nine children and 12 grandchildren, “scattered all over the country.” He also continues to keep a hand in the energy business, though not as a frontman.
“Understandably, younger people that are bright and kind of up and coming, they don’t want to hear some old guy telling some old stories about how the old days were great, because they weren’t always great. And it’s appropriate that the old guys step aside, let some new blood in the door.”
—Sandy Segrist, Senior Editor, Gas and Midstream