This May 17, at the annual shareholders meeting of Bill Barrett Corp. in Denver, Bill Barrett formally stepped down as chairman and chief executive officer of his namesake firm. And with that move, a chapter in nearly 50 years of exploration history in the Rocky Mountains came to a close. Since 1957, when he graduated from Kansas State University with a master's degree in geology and joined El Paso Natural Gas Co., the Topeka, Kansas, native has brought passion and discipline to studying and unlocking the hydrocarbon potential of the Rockies. The result: major oil and gas finds and a string of successful company launches that have enriched investors and changed geological knowledge of the region. His first job as a research-lab stratigrapher for El Paso in Salt Lake City was pivotal. "Right off the bat, I got to run the lithology on all of El Paso's wells in the Rockies, primarily wildcat wells, identifying the porosity and permeability and various geologic characteristics of rock samples from Utah's Uinta Basin, Colorado's Piceance Basin and Wyoming's Greater Green River Basin," he says. Three years later, Barrett got an offer from Amoco (then Pan American Petroleum) to work in Casper, Wyoming, as an exploration project geologist. "During my six years with Amoco, the company took me through 'charm school,' that is, management training," he says. "But when the offer came to move to New Orleans, I decided to remain in Denver and joined Wolf Exploration as chief geologist." Although the private independent bought and sold leases to the majors, Barrett helped talk the company into keeping one-quarter of the leases sold. That turned out to be a good move. On those leases, Barrett found two major Wyoming oil and gas fields. "We went from zero production to 10,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day." Within three years, privately held Wolf went public, changing its name to Inexco Corp. It also moved to Houston. That's when Barrett and another Inexco hand, Chuck Shear, exited and formed their own private Denver company-B&C Exploration-to focus on the Rockies. "At the same time we formed that company, Don Carpenter, a geologist running Inexco's Casper office, quit and formed Rainbow Resources," says Barrett. "Soon, both our companies started doing everything together. Ultimately, we merged B&C into Rainbow, I became vice president of exploration and a director, and the company went on to be very successful." That's an understatement. Casper-headquartered Rainbow, formed in 1969 with $250,000 of seed capital and shares worth 50 cents each, ended up selling to The Williams Cos. for $19 per share in 1978. "I had to sign a three-year, non-compete agreement that I wouldn't form another public company or compete with Williams," says the explorationist. "So I waited until 1981 before forming Barrett Resources." That company, worth a couple million dollars in 1981, was sold to The Williams Cos. in 2001 for $2.8 billion. After that sale, Barrett formed his current namesake company with private-equity backing, taking it public in December 2004. The accomplishments of the Rockies explorationist haven't gone unnoticed. In 1998, he received the Wildcatter of the Year award from the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States. In 2003, he received an award for his career exploration successes from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. And last year, he received an honorary doctorate degree in petroleum engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. But there's a lot more to Barrett than any one accolade, company-building effort or oil and gas find can capture. When Oil and Gas Investor recently visited him, we found the kind of perspective about the oil and gas industry and the Rockies that can only come from close to a half-century of hydrocarbon-hunting. Investor - How has the industry changed during the almost 50 years you've been involved in it? Barrett - It has been a very cyclical business, with all its booms and busts. But the actual hunting for oil and gas hasn't changed all that much. We still continue to learn more as additional wells are drilled and fields are developed. In fact, I've never seen a period where there haven't been opportunities for a geologist to find hydrocarbons. And with the advances in geophysics and completion/frac technology that have occurred over this time, the whole industry has been able to move into many projects that just weren't economical earlier in my career. However, there has been one major change the industry has witnessed in the past 10 years-regulatory and environmental hurdles have completely changed the way the industry does business. Investor - For better or worse? Barrett - I think for the worse. I didn't realize how onerous things were until we formed Bill Barrett Corp. and went public. It used to be that if you wanted to go out and raise capital in the public-equity market, it might take you two to three months to get that done. Well, it took us 10 months from the time we filed to take Bill Barrett Corp. public and is probably costing us some $2 million more annually [to be a public company] than it would have previously, due to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. In addition, there are so many environmental hoops you have to jump through today to get drilling programs under way. The whole permitting, environmental-assessment and environmental impact statement (EIS) process now takes three years, whereas it used to take three to six months. For example, we're now in the process of doing an EIS for the development of our West Tavaputs prospect area in Utah's Uinta Basin. We started that a year ago and we'll probably get it completed in another two years. What's troubling is that this isn't occurring in just that one area. It's happening just about anywhere the oil and gas industry does business in the Rockies. So it's very difficult to get things done. You wind up spending 60% of your time on these hurdles rather than on finding oil and gas. Investor - How have advances in drilling/completion technologies affected your approach to the Rockies? Barrett - We're now focused a lot more on unconventional resources, such as tight-sand gas plays, whereas 15 years ago we were focused primarily on conventional resources. That said, we still focus on conventional resources like the West Tavaputs play. So the premium is still on how well our people know the geology of an area and recognize the opportunities there. West Tavaputs, for instance, which your magazine awarded Best Discovery of 2005, is probably going to be a 1-trillion-cubic-foot (Tcf) gas field. (For more on the discovery, see "Deep Utah Potential," Oil and Gas Investor, March 2006.) Investor - Have the technological advances improved exploration success during the past 50 years? Barrett - As I said, you still really have to know all the nuts and bolts of geology. However, the advantage we have today is that computers can go through much more geological, geophysical and engineering data much quicker compared with when we had to go through it by hand. The more data you have, the smarter you're going to be. That's why drilling success rates are going up. Investor - Which other Denver producers have contributed to understanding the geology of the Rockies? Barrett - Companies like Western Gas Resources, Westport Resources and Tom Brown. I'm talking about people like Peter Dea, Don Wolf and Jim Lightner, as well as Ken Luff, who heads up Luff Exploration, and Bill Armstrong of Armstrong Oil & Gas. Investor - What's your own proudest achievement in Rockies exploration success? Barrett - Probably the biggest find I've been credited with is the Madden gas field, a more than 4Tcf field in Wyoming's Wind River Basin discovered by Wolf Exploration [which became Inexco] in the late '60s. Also, while at that firm, I was credited in 1968 with finding the Highlight Field, a several-hundred-million-barrel oil field in the southern part of Wyoming's Powder River Basin. Then there's Colorado's Piceance Basin, probably the biggest play going on right now in the Rockies. Up until 1983, the basin had never been developed for gas because it was right in the middle of the huge oil-shale play the majors had going on. But that year, Exxon decided to get out of this oil-shale play and the other majors followed suit. This allowed us [Barrett Resources] to get into the basin and put together a 40,000-acre position. That event kicked off the Piceance Basin gas play. People thought we were crazy then but by the time we sold Barrett Resources to The Williams Cos. in 2001, we had grown proved reserves there to 2.1 Tcf. Investor - What's the big play that got away? Barrett - I remember when the Pineview discovery well in Utah's Overthrust Belt kicked off the Wyoming/Utah Overthrust play in the early 1970s. A friend of mine, Digger Smith, had gotten a farm-out from Amoco and drilled that well. He told me the well and the play looked pretty good. But I discounted it. That was foolish. The discovery kicked off several Tcf gas fields. Investor - Any other regrets? Barrett - The Wattenberg Field in Colorado's D-J Basin. We got into that play after selling Rainbow Resources to The Williams Cos. in 1978. I had been with Amoco when it discovered Wattenberg in the late '60s so I knew the play. Most of the Wattenberg acreage had been drilled since then, all to the J sand, but we detailed the heck out of the field and found there were still huge areas around the edges of the acreage that looked productive. So we top-leased every one of Amoco's leases and ended up with a huge position-plus we got a farm-out on a big area in the field, the St. Vrain block, that wasn't drilled. The J sand was terrific. We ended up drilling 200 J-sand wells. Also, while drilling these 7,000-foot wells, we ran into the shallower Codell-Niobrara formation at 6,500 feet and completed a number of those wells. This was right at the beginning of the Codell-Niobrara play and I thought it wasn't very economic at then-$1 to $1.40gas prices, and that frac technology hadn't gotten far enough along to effectively produce the play's tight-gas sands. So we ended up selling out to Snyder Oil for a great price-four times our PV-10 value. Still, I didn't recognize then how frac technology was going to improve the value of that play. Today, it's a multi-Tcf field. Nonetheless, we took what we learned from massive frac technology in the Wattenberg and applied it later to the Piceance, which worked out really well for us. The lesson here: you never stop learning in this business. Investor - How much resource potential do you think remains in the Rockies? Barrett - When you talk about recoverable reserves, it's certainly at least 100 Tcf of gas. But recoverability is very much dependent on gas prices because you need a high gas price to develop all the unconventional plays that are to be found in the Rockies. Investor - What does the future hold for Bill Barrett Corp. in the Rockies? Barrett We've got six prospect areas that are multiple-Tcf-type gas plays: West Tavaputs and Lake Canyon, both in Utah's Uinta Basin; Circus, a potential 5- to 7-Tcf Overthrust Belt prospect in Montana; two fractured-shale plays in the Paradox Basin, which straddles Colorado and Utah; the Gibson Gulch Field in the Piceance Basin; and an untested basin-centered gas play in Wyoming's Bighorn Basin. Investor - With so much potential left in the Rockies, why are you retiring? Barrett - I'm 77, my wife is 75, we're still in pretty good health and we both love to travel, so now seems like a good time to do that. Also, I'm retiring because the guys with Bill Barrett Corp. deserve the chance to run that company. In addition, I'm a bit tired of all of the regulatory and environmental hurdles a producer has to put up with these days. Investor - Will it be hard for you in your travels to look at mountains or valleys and not think about their oil and gas potential? Barrett - Probably. Geology is everywhere. Not long ago, we went to an area of China near Hong Kong that looked like rich delta country. I thought to myself this must be great oil country and indeed, the Chinese have made a number of discoveries in that area. Investor - Will the company's strategy change now that you've retired? Barrett - I don't expect it will a lot, knowing the guys running it. Certainly, I expect each of them to ride their own horse and put their own fingerprints on the company; however, I don't think the firm's Rockies focus will change. Today, those guys have a really good entity with some great projects and properties and my son Fred has gone from being a very good geologist to chairman and chief executive officer of the company. And if any of them ever want to run something by me, I'll always be available. Investor - Any personal ambition you haven't realized? Barrett - I would have loved to have played the banjo or some musical instrument, as my dad did, because I like bluegrass and all kinds of music. Investor - What would you like to be remembered for most in terms of industry contribution? Barrett - Simply as a pretty good oil and gas explorationist who was in the right place at the right time on a few occasions-that and maybe helping a few people out along the way.