John B. Brock III was in the oil and gas business for nearly 50 years, building big companies and legacy assets. Looking back, he is most proud of two things.


First, the firm he once helmed, United Meridian, dared to venture offshore West Africa when other independents weren’t, and when West Africa was not the hot spot it is today. It found the 1-billion-barrel Zafiro Field offshore Equatorial Guinea in 1995 as a result.


Second, but to Brock this is even more important: at least 10 of his colleagues from the United Meridian-Ocean Energy Corp. days became public energy-company CEOs and five are still CEOs of successful independents themselves. “People are always most important,” he says.


Now retired, he enjoys following what these former colleagues are doing. They include Don Wolf of Denver-based Quantum Energy Resources, and Houston-based John Schiller of Energy XXI, Bill Transier of Endeavour International, Jim Hackett of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Jim Flores of Plains Exploration & Production Co.


A 1954 petroleum engineering graduate of Louisiana State University, Brock first worked for Humble Oil, an Exxon predecessor, and in 1956 joined what is now Chevron. Next, he worked with Quintana Petroleum, and formed Brock Petroleum Co. in 1980.
He merged it with Ensource in 1985. United Meridian bought Ensource in 1989 and those assets were rolled up with others to form UMC Petroleum, which went public in 1993. Denver’s General Atlantic went public under Wolf at about the same time and, in 1994, the companies merged.


In 1998, UMC merged with Louisiana independent Flores & Rucks, which was later renamed Ocean Energy and then merged with Seagull Energy, whose CEO, Hackett, took that position at the combined company, Flores became chairman, and Brock and former Seagull chairman Barry Galt remained on the board.

Finally, in 2003, Ocean and Devon Energy Corp. merged, creating the largest U.S. independent at the time with an enterprise value of $20 billion.
In addition to investing, hunting and spending time with his extended family—John VI is now six months old—Brock sits on some boards, such as at Amegy Bank. A dedicated LSU Tigers fan, he received the LSU Foundation President’s Award for lifetime support at the trendsetter level and in 1994 was inducted into LSU’s Hall of Distinction.
Here, he visits with Oil and Gas Investor on his observations of the energy industry past, present and future.

Investor Would you ever want to start an E&P company again?
Brock I think I’ve done my thing. But today it’s a wonderful world for the E&P guy. These oil and gas prices are to die for, and the capital is available. It’s marvelous.

Investor What advice would you have for any one starting up?
Brock My advice would be not to be a pure exploration company or a pure exploitation company, but to have a balance of both. I think Devon is a marvelous company and it seems to me they have the perfect mix, with the Barnett shale—they have a thousand locations to drill there—and in the deepwater Gulf, where they have the most acreage of any independent. And they have some strong international assets as well.
When Larry Nichols [chairman and CEO of Devon] made the decision to sell out of West Africa, it stabbed me in the heart. Those were my deals! But in retrospect, he is doing the right thing. They can’t do everything.

Investor How did the small UMC get into West Africa?
Brock I’m proud of what we did there. In the early 1990s, not that much was happening there. Everybody had dropped their acreage and left. And the U.S. industry was in the ditch. The U.K. industry was in the ditch. We just didn’t see that much growth possible in the U.S.
Our consulting geologist, Ted Barr, knew about some old seismic data that Repsol had shot and Petroconsultants [now IHS] had stashed in a basement in Geneva. Ted brought the idea to UMC and we acquired the data.
I was walking by our conference room one day and heard the guys were pretty excited, so I ducked in and looked at the maps they had on Equatorial Guinea—it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my career. The acreage was open. The next flight there was Saturday. This was Thursday. I told them to get on that flight and take it all.
We turned the prospect to Mobil at the time, and lo and behold the second well we drilled was Zafiro Field, which will turn out to be above a billion barrels of oil. We also found Esmeralda there. Then, offshore Core d’Ivoire, we found the Panther, Lion, and CI-01 fields.

Investor What was the hardest decision you ever made?
Brock To give up Ocean, which was a fine company after all the acquisitions and mergers we’d made, and with its outstanding management and board. The argument was so compelling, to sell it to a company like Devon that was going to rise up. It was the right thing to do at the right time. But it was a hard decision to make.

Investor What’s your outlook for the U.S. gas industry?
Brock U.S. companies have a track record of overbuilding capacity. The big issue is, what is the demand at $7 or $8 gas? We don’t know. It won’t be the U.S. that dictates prices, not even for LNG. I’m worried about that effect on U.S. gas prices—I don’t think it’s going to be real smooth when all that LNG starts arriving here.