Trevor Rees-Jones
Editor’s note: This profile is part of Hart Energy’s Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
Trevor Rees-Jones has been in the oil and gas business for decades, and he doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon.
“I’ll retire when I’m no longer breathing,” Rees-Jones, founder of Chief Energy, told Oil and Gas Investor (OGI). “Until then, I’ll carry on.”
The Dallas native got his start in the oil and gas business in 1984. Prior to that, Rees-Jones was an oil and gas lawyer. However, he found the inner workings of the oil and gas business itself to be more interesting than the legal work, so he made the change after a few years. He has never entertained any other careers since.
“I pretty much had to make it in the oil and gas business or go back to being a lawyer,” Rees-Jones said.
Times got tougher for the oil industry in the years that immediately followed. An oversupply of crude oil, falling demand and slowing economic activity contributed to lower oil prices.
Historical data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show the purchase price for U.S. crude oil was around $26/bbl in 1984. That slid to about $10.75/bbl by mid-1986.
The natural gas wellhead price was about $2.65/Mcf in 1984. That fell to about $1.85/Mcf by mid-1986.
Rees-Jones laughed about those early days in the business in an interview with OGI in 2007. According to the article, he said “it was a good thing he was single at the time or he never could have done it. And he didn’t think the law profession would take him back.”
The tide eventually turned—not only in the industry’s favor but also for the wildcatter.
Wildcatting wonder
Rees-Jones began investing in minerals and royalty rights, according to Chief Energy’s website. His Chief Oil & Gas was formed in 1994 and went on to make its mark in the Barnett Shale. Rees-Jones once called the Fort Worth Basin the “sorriest and most depleted basin around” before its heyday. But he kept at it, motivated by several factors.
“No. 1, I really enjoyed the search for oil and gas even though I was in a heavily depleted area. I was just trying to find a lower risk way to go about it,” Rees-Jones said. “And I just enjoyed what I was doing.… I enjoyed drilling wells. And another motivation was that, as I mentioned before, it would have been a nightmare to bust it out and have to go back [to] being a lawyer. I didn’t have any choice, but I had to stay the course and find a way to succeed.”
He did.
Rees-Jones said one of the most memorable moments of his career came when he began drilling Barnett Shale wells in the 1990s and started seeing some success.
“That was about 15 years after I’d gotten into the oil and gas business with very little to show for it,” he said. “To be able to start making some good wells on a fairly consistent basis was definitely a high point.”
Those days marked the beginning of the shale revolution. Chief Oil and Gas was among the early movers of what he called the first of the great new shale plays.
“Of course, Mitchell Energy and Development/George Mitchell had pioneered the Barnett Shale, but we had identified what we called a second prong to the south of where Mitchell was concentrating its activity,” Rees-Jones said. “And it ended up drilling out very, very well. So, the Barnett was what started it all. Being able to figure out how to bust hydrocarbons out of that tight rock, in that instance natural gas, was groundbreaking and revolutionary and kicked off what’s now termed the shale revolution.”
Bust to boom
The area of Wise County in the Fort Worth Basin was crowded with operators at the time, he recalled, noting Chief was fortunate enough to not only be there but to have jumped into the Barnett fairly early.
The value of that move paid off in 2006 when Chief Oil & Gas sold most of its Barnett properties. The $2.63 billion deal included the sale of E&P assets to Devon Energy for $2.15 billion and selling the midstream assets to Crosstex Energy for
$480 million. Looking at the bids was another memorable moment for
Rees-Jones.
“A couple of them were far beyond anything any of us could have possibly imagined,” he said.
He had come a long way from worrying about having to seal a deal each month to buy his family groceries and pay his bills, which Rees-Jones called another memorable moment.
By 2006, gas prices had risen to $8/Mcf, far from the $1.93/Mcf in early 1994.
Oil and gas prices kept climbing. By 2008, the shale boom was in full effect: the Henry Hub natural gas spot price reached $12.69/Mcf and WTI hit $145.31/bbl.
Several more million- and billion-dollar deals followed, including the $1.3 billion sale of some Barnett Shale assets with Ross Perot’s Hillwood Oil and Gas to Quicksilver Resources in 2008.
Chief began operating in the Marcellus Shale in 2007 and about four years later, the company sold about 228,000 net acres to Chevron. In 2012, Rees-Jones sold the company’s pipeline network in the Marcellus for about $1 billion to Penn Virginia Resources.
Rees-Jones sold Chief Oil and Gas itself, along with associated non-operated interests held by affiliates of Tug Hill, in 2022 to Chesapeake Energy for about $2 billion.
He believes natural gas has a promising future, including in a lower-carbon world.
“The reason that the United States has lower carbon emissions today than 10-15 years ago is because of natural gas,” Rees-Jones said. “And I think until the so-called renewable fuels infrastructure and everything there is built out, natural gas is going to remain a large part of what generates our electricity.”
Giving back
Rees-Jones has been recognized for his perseverance. His recent honors include the 2023 Horatio Alger Award, which is awarded by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans to leaders who have overcome adversity to accomplish remarkable successes.
“Mr. Rees-Jones exemplifies the importance of believing in yourself and refusing to give up when success isn’t happening quickly or easily,” Terrence J. Giroux, the association’s executive director, said in a 2023 news release about the award. “He took a risk leaving a steady law career because he knew his passion was elsewhere and showed tremendous dedication. By trusting his intuition and following a dream, he founded one of the most successful natural gas companies in the world. Mr. Rees-Jones will serve as a great source of inspiration to our Scholars and we are delighted to welcome him as a member.”
Rees-Jones and his wife, Jan, are also supporting youth and others via the Rees-Jones Foundation, which was founded in 2006. Its most recent contributions included a $100 million gift to support construction of a new pediatric campus by Children’s Health and UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The central hospital tower will be named Rees-Jones Tower, according to an October 2024 news release.
Today, Chief Energy is mostly active in the biggest oil and gas basin in the U.S.
“We are doing a lot of drilling of non-operated interest. Our primary focus is in the Permian,” Rees-Jones said. “But we’re also involved in many other plays throughout the United States.”
To people considering careers in oil and gas, Rees-Jones said it’s a great industry.
“It’s been a wonderful business and career for me,” he said. “I think it’s very exciting work and it can be very rewarding if you stay the course and are lucky enough to find yourself well situated like I did.”
—Velda Addison, senior editor, energy transition