J. Robert Ransone, president and chief operating officer for Plano, Texas-based Barnes Oil & Gas LLC, has received the inaugural A&D Achievement Award from Oil and Gas Investor magazine and A&D Watch newsletter for his contributions to forums for intelligence-gathering and improvements in oil and gas property acquisition and divestiture best practices.

Ransone was recognized at the eighth annual A&D Strategies and Opportunities conference in Dallas on Sept. 2, 2009. The conference, co-founded and co-presented by Oil and Gas Investor and A&D Watch in 2002, is among Ransone’s achievements in promoting further professional development in oil and gas A&D.

Ransone had already co-founded the Dallas-based ADAM Energy Forum in 1994 as a networking and information-sharing organization for Dallas- and Fort Worth-area A&D professionals, when taking on the goal of an A&D conference.

“Robert called Bob Jarvis, our publisher at the time (who is now vice president of membership, business development and capital markets for IPAA), one day in late 2001 or early 2002 and said, ‘Bob, we need an A&D conference in Dallas,’” says Nissa Darbonne, editor of A&D Watch at the time and now e-editor for its publisher, Hart Energy Publishing LP.

“Soon, Bob and I were visiting with Robert and developing an agenda. The first conference was hosted in September 2002 in North Dallas. It moved to The Fairmont downtown in 2003 and has been held here since.”

Attendees the first year numbered some 130, including speakers; the event has grown to host more than 550 leading E&P-company asset buyers and sellers, financiers, property marketers, business analysts, advisors and investors.

Keynote speakers have included Ray Hunt, chairman, president and CEO of Hunt Oil Co.; Aubrey K. McClendon, chairman, president and CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp.; Peter Barker-Homek, CEO of TAQA-Abu Dhabi National Energy Co.; T. Boone Pickens, chairman of BP Capital; Keith Rattie, chairman, president and CEO of Questar Corp.; Keith Hutton, CEO of XTO Energy Inc.; the late Frank Pitts, founder of Pitts Oil Co.; Tom Petrie, vice chairman of Merrill Lynch; Al Walker, COO of Anadarko Petroleum Corp.; Don Wolf, chairman of Quantum Resources Management; John Walker, chairman, president and CEO, EV Energy Partners and EnerVest Management Co.; Clayton Williams, founder and chairman of Clayton Williams Energy Inc.; Dan Pickering, co-president and head of research for Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. LLC; and Art Smith, former chairman, IHS Herold.

The one-day conference has grown to include live-streaming of proceedings via the Internet in each of the past two years, and a half-day workshop, including a “Let’s Make A Deal” lab.

Meanwhile, ADAM Energy Forum has grown to more than 275 members from energy companies in five states.

Ransone says of co-founding ADAM Energy Forum of which he was president from 1997-2003 and remains an officer and trustee, “This was in 1994 and David Rice, at The Wiser Oil Co. then, suggested we put a group together. We began having luncheons, and then invited speakers and started formal memberships and dues.”

The first A&D Strategies and Opportunities conference in September 2002 was booked for a Westin hotel in North Dallas, but hotel management pushed the event to a closed Sheraton next door when a larger event requested the Westin date. “We called it the ‘ghost hotel,’” Ransone says of the unexpected venue, “but we had it to ourselves and we had a great start to this conference.”

From 2005 to 2007, Ransone was a partner with responsibility for A&D with Duer Wagner III. From 2004-05, he was vice president of business development and CFO for Five States Energy LLC, which owned more than $300 million of oil and gas producing properties. At Five States, in addition to his duties as CFO, he oversaw A&D. From 1995 to 2004, he was founding partner, president and CEO of asset marketer Wellspring Partners LLC, which enabled more than $850 million in oil and gas acquisitions and divestitures. In 2004, he sold Wellspring to PLS, another asset marketer.

In addition, Ransone advises Stanford University with respect to investments in the petroleum sector. He currently serves on the Dallas Wildcat Committee of the Dallas Petroleum Club and he has served on numerous other committees of the club, is a past regional director and member of the board of directors of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), and a past president and current board member of the Texas Energy Council (TEC) and past vice president and board member of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers.