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SHP Dubbed “#1 On West Coast” by LBBJ
November 20, 2014SHP was featured on the cover of the Long Beach Business Journal for the recent 2014 Oil and Gas E&P Company of the Year award. Read the following excerpt from the Long Beach Business Journal’s November 11-24, 2014 issue to see why they dubbed Signal Hill Petroleum “#1 On West Coast”.
#1 On West Coast – Signal Hill Petroleum Names Top Exploration/Production Company
Pictured near one of their drilling sites with Signal Hill Petroleum President and CEO Craig Barto, center, are David Slater, left, the firm’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, and Kevin Laney, vice president of rig operations for the company. (Photograph by the Business Journal’s Thomas McConville)
Long Beach Business Journal – November 11-24, 2014
By Michael Gougis, Contributing Writer
Beautiful, high-end condominiums with a view of blue-green Pacific Ocean waters and crude oil drilling and pumping rigs would seem to go together like – well, water and oil.
But not only has Signal Hill Petroleum managed to look for, ding and extract thousands of barrels of crude oil a day in such a challenging environment, it has performed the task so well that it was named the TEEMCO E&P Company of the Year for 2014 at the recent West Coast Oil And Gas awards ceremony.
“A lot of people in the industry thought this field was dead,” says David Slater, executive vice president and CEO of Signal Hill Petroleum. “But it’s a huge remaining resource. It took technology to economically unlock it.”
A combination of cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned public relations outreach has allowed the company to flourish in a potentially difficult environment, said the judges who awarded the firm the Exploration & Production Company of the Year award.
“Through use of sustainability programs, innovative exploration and extraction techniques, environmental/emission controls and community enhancement programs, the company appears to be able to work very successfully in an urban environment where other companies may struggle,” the judges said.
Founded in 1984, the company started with the acquisition of Shell’s assets on Signal Hill. Shell was repositioning in oil extraction operations elsewhere, and had put the Signal Hill assets up for sale. The field actually was owned by three large companies – Shell, ARCO and Texaco – and Signal Hill Petroleum spent the next two decades consolidating those properties into a single company.
“It was a very, very major accomplishment to aggregate ownership,” Slater says. “What that did was open the economic possibility of applying technology and doing a lot of things that had not been done before because of the fragmented ownership.
As a more mature asset, the field relies on salt water injection to make the field productive, Slater says. Salt water injection is done “to re-pressurize it (the underground reserves) and mobilize the remaining oil,” he says.
But drilling injection wells and extraction wells accurately relies on a thorough, detailed understanding of the subsurface soil formations. The high-end technology used by the company involves the three-dimensional mapping of the sub-strata in a way that Signal Hill Petroleum helped develop, a method of subsurface imaging that met the needs of an oil producing company trying to work in an urban environment.
Traditional three-dimensional imaging “is not very urban-friendly.” Slater says. “Lots of equipment, lots of cable.” Basically, the process relies on thousands of sensors that detect minute vibrations – but those sensors had to be connected together via cables. Signal Hill Petroleum began working with a company that was developing a system that collected the data wirelessly. When the wireless data gathering was perfected, Signal Hill Petroleum became the first oil company in the world to put such a system into field operation.
What the data shows the company “is how the earth is cracked and bent. It’s similar to what people who study earthquakes are interested in,” Slater says. The data has, in fact, been shared with institutions and universities across the nation. And it has given the company a clearer view of the cracks, bends and folds of the earth’s crust – data that the company uses to drill for crude. It has worked so well that the company actually is drilling new wells in the field – the first new wells in decades.
Currently, the company operates about 450 wells and produces about 3,500 barrels per day. And it does so largely in harmony with its neighbors. Debra Montalvo Russell, director of community relations, says Signal Hill Petroleum is a visible, accessible member of the community, and that helps maintain positive relations with the people who live and work near the company’s operations.
“We are out there so much, and we are giving information, and we are so accessible,” she says. “The difference about our company is that we put a face to the name,” she says. “Most of our employees are local residents. They are faces that people will recognize in the store, in the community. So people know and trust us. We’re here as members of the community.”
“We work really hard to be transparent, to be face-t-face, to provide real information, to open the gates,” Slater says. “Come on in and take a look – we’ll show you what we do and how we do it.”