Alan Linn became chief executive officer of Australian independent Roc Oil in February 2011. He joined Roc Oil in 2001 and previously held positions with ExxonMobil, Cairn Energy, and Tullow. He spoke to JPT on the sidelines of the conference.
How has your company evolved over the past several years?
The company was founded on an exploration model at a time when that business model was quite attractive to the investment community. We were involved in some fairly high-risk areas, some of which worked well and some of which did not. We have since gone through a rebranding.
I took over as CEO about 2 years ago and what I did was look at the portfolio to capitalize on what we had done well. And that was typically in places where we had good knowledge of the basins and where we were a niche player. We got out of Africa and out of LNG. When we had success in exploration it was when we came in with some unconventional ideas and we could project manage the field ourselves.
Where is your focus now?
We have done well when we have developed smaller, marginal fields and technically complex reservoirs, and we have had most of our success in Australia and China. We come in looking to be the operator and wanting to ensure that we will manage the life cycle of the well from the outset. Our focus now is on oil, and we concentrate on China, on Australia, and have added southeast Asia.
In Malaysia, there is an increasing importance on developing domestic production, and there are world-class basins there. We have bid on risk service contracts with a local partner there and that has worked well for us. In China we are looking to build off our existing positions, and we have partnerships with PetroChina, CNOOC, and Sinochem that are long established. We are working with mature fields, smaller field development, and doing some exploration there.
What are the advantages of your new strategy?
We have existing production and we add on to that production and replace our reserves through strong applications of reservoir management. So the reserves are being replaced, which throws off positive cash flow. So we are able to finance our exploration with cash flow rather than go to the equity markets.
What are your geographic priorities going forward?
Malaysia, China, Australia, and we are looking at Myanmar. Myanmar is more of an onshore play. The big guys want to do the deep water there. But there’s 100 years of production in Myanmar with very little Western seismic so our ability to understand the potential will benefit significantly from an investment in technology. No one really knows what you have there.
What distinguishes Roc Oil from similarly sized companies?
I think we are out front in our space in two areas. We do quite complicated reservoirs and smaller reservoirs, and we know that if we get them wrong then we will not get much out of them. So we have to make sure we get the reservoir piece right. So the integration between geology and geophysics and between reservoir and petroleum engineering and the drillers is really important for us. There are no silos in our organization—we are too small for that. That is one area where we are strong.
The other area is that when you are looking at developing smaller fields, you have to ensure that the facilities you install are safe from an integrity process standpoint. So we put a lot of effort into the design and setup of the facilities to ensure that we can come in and be the operator and can manage the life cycle of the asset. We have to be innovative. We come in with a simple facility that has limited opportunity to go wrong. So sometimes it’s not new technology; it’s a different application of existing technology. A lot of the technology we use is established but may have been designed for bigger fields. For instance, we currently are in the process of converting a vessel to be a mini FPSO.
Linn is a chartered chemical engineer with 30 years of international operational and joint-venture management experience in both the upstream and downstream oil sectors. He spent 15 years at ExxonMobil working in downstream and upstream assignments in the UK and US before working in the E&P oil sector for Lasmo, Cairn Energy, and Tullow in senior operational and business management roles. He was also operations director for African Arabian Petroleum, a privately owned E&P company with headquarters in Dubai.
