George Solich
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.
In a case of life imitating art, George Solich went to college on a caddy scholarship from Broodmoor Golf Club in his native Colorado Springs.
It is debatable whether the comedy classic “Caddyshack” is indeed art, but there is no debate that Solich has blazed a spectacular career building and selling a series of larger and more ambitious independent production companies. That culminated with the $6.4-billion sale of DoublePoint Energy to Pioneer Natural Resources in 2021.
“I started as a finance major at University of Colorado,” Solich told Hart Energy. “At the time, the only companies coming to campus to recruit were oil and gas firms. So, several of my friends and I switched majors to Minerals Land Management, which at the time was offered through the business school.”
That good timing did not last. “As soon as I graduated in 1983, the bottom dropped out of the oil business,” Solich said with a wry smile. “The first job I got was actually just an internship at Belco Petroleum, which was the genesis of EOG in the early days of Enron.”
He then worked for Apache Corp. (now APA) in Denver before attending grad school at the University of Colorado at Denver to earn a master’s degree in finance and marketing. “Frankly, I was not so enamored with the oil and gas business at the time and my first thought was going to work on Wall Street. Then Apache moved its headquarters from Minneapolis to Denver. Then we bought a significant acquisition from Amoco and doubled the size of the company.”
Apache moved its offices to Houston, and Solich was among the first to leave the mountains of the Front Range south for the Buffalo Bayou.
“Houston became the center of the acquire-and-exploit strategy,” Solich recalled. “We were working worldwide, around North America as well as Egypt, Poland, China—all over. It was a great place to learn. We were very fortunate and worked very hard.”
In 1997, Solich was courted by HS Resources to move back to Denver and lead an effort to buy Amoco out of the Denver-Julesburg (D-J) Basin. “I spent three years with HS, and at that point felt like I had enough experience under my belt that it was time to go out on my own. That was a good time, too, because there was a lot of capital flowing into the sector.”
It was 2000, and Solich got the then-impressive soft commitment of $10 million from EnCap to form Cordillera I with a focus on the Midcontinent, San Juan and D-J basins. That was sold to Patina Oil & Gas. Knowing a winner, EnCap backed Solich with $200 million for Cordillera II, which focused on the Bakken and Permian as well as the Midcontinent.
“We focused on the acquire-and-exploit strategy,” Solich said. “We found undervalued, underappreciated and misunderstood acres, bought ’em, and put a drill bit to ’em.”
Not wanting to miss a beat in the shale boom, Solich and EnCap agreed to fund Cordillera III while Cordillera II was still in operation.”
After Cordillera III, Solich launched FourPoint Energy, initially focusing in the Midcontinent. In 2018, FourPoint and Double Eagle announced their partnership in DoublePoint Energy in the Midland Basin, later sold to Pioneer. Over the course of his career, Solich has also formed several mineral interests businesses. He is now re-growing FourPoint, as well as forming plans for a new minerals business.
—Gregory Morris, Contributing Editor