Fred Julander has been tireless in advocating for natural gas—and he started doing it long before shale fever hit the headlines. The Denver independent has worked for years on behalf of his wildcatter E&P company, Julander Energy Co., which he founded in 1989; and on behalf of natural gas, especially in the Rocky Mountain states.

In the late 1980s, he read a newspaper article about natural gas vehicles and thought it was a splendid idea that ought to be embraced in a collaboration of utilities , gas producers and pipeline companies. So he formed an NGV company with them.

But Julander's biggest legacy is no doubt the annual Rocky Mountain Natural Gas Strategy Conference and Investment Forum (now the Rocky Mountain Energy Epicenter) held in Denver, for and with the Colorado Oil & Gas Association. He founded the conference in 1989 and remains the event chairman to this day.

Through the early 1990s especially, gas production in the Rockies was soaring from coalbed methane and tight gas in areas such as the Raton Basin and Jonah and Pinedale fields in Wyoming. Julander worked hard to bring those plays to the country's attention.

"These things burn in my heart," he says.

Julander is a graduate of the University of New Mexico. He also has a JD from the University of Iowa Law School and a 1984 MBA from the University of Denver, as well as having taken several geology and petroleum courses at the Colorado School of Mines.

His first job out of law school was as an editor for a short-lived, college-life magazine based in New York City. He returned to Denver and entered the oil business, which his father was in as an employee of Stanolind Oil & Gas (a forerunner to Amoco, then BP).

Julander worked for Texan John H. Hill in extending Colorado's famed Wattenberg Field in Weld County, by virtue of finding the first Shannon oil production there in 1972. Since founding his own company, he has focused on exploration in tight sands, coalbed methane and shales in Colorado and Wyoming. Many such prospects were farmed out to majors in the region.

In 2011 Julander is serving on the National Petroleum Council's committee on resource development and on the board of RPSEA (Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America), among other resource-focused committees and groups. He's been active in Denver civic affairs as well.

We caught up with Julander after the 23rd annual Rocky Mountain Energy Epicenter had concluded.

Investor: Fred, you're such an advocate for Rocky Mountain gas production, does the advent of all the shale plays elsewhere threaten you?

Julander: No, not at all. We've got so much gas here in the tight sands and coalbed methane that we didn't focus on shales much before now. But we'll bring on our own Haynesvilles, our own Marcellus. We'll have shale-gas giants here in the Rockies. Denver and Colorado have always been leaders in developing unconventional resources.

But, we are proud of what independents have done in other regions.

Investor: You were on to natural gas vehicles a long time ago.

Julander: The industry was all so balkanized then. Utilities were in their own world; pipelines were in their own world. Producers the same. Nobody was working together. So, I joined with Public Service Co. of Colorado (now Xcel Energy) and CIG (Colorado Interstate Gas Co., now part of El Paso), to form the Rockies' first natural gas vehicle company, Natural Fuels Corp. We later sold it to Clean Energy Fuels Corp., the public company owned by T. Boone Pickens.

Investor: Is Julander itself still drilling?

Julander: Oh yes, we still do some. We have three large-scale wildcat projects in shales and tight sands stacked up that we've been working on. We may drill a horizontal Sussex test this year, but it may slip into next year. We have the leases in hand. There is a lack of equipment for the small guys, but we'll get through it. This is a business big enough for everyone.

Wildcatting has its own pains and rewards. We've been successful so many times on the geology of a play but—like the rest of the industry in these unconventional-resource plays—less so with the engineering. It takes a while to get the engineering right.

Investor: What is the opportunity?

Julander: We'll still have lots of oil and gas in the ground years from now, when we finally have a silver bullet that fires. We're going to need a ton of energy. You can't have modern civilization for 8 billion people without it. That's huge.

We've provided heat and light for the country for 100 years and now, we are going to do it for the whole world. This industry should be proud and humble about it, as we have a great responsibility to do this safely.

Investor: What do you see as the biggest challenges?

Julander: To take this on our shoulders, to be big enough and conduct ourselves in the most noble fashion, to have a substantial impact on peoples' lives, with all the fuel we are going to produce for them—they need to trust us, like us. It will take transparency and dramatic environmental sensitivity. We've got to do these things in order to produce as much gas as we responsibly can on a worldwide basis.

The North American gas industry is going to lead the world for the next several decades in matters of energy and the environment.

—Leslie Haines
For archives of interviews with industry legends, see OilandGasInvestor.com.