Working in a small shop is the right fit for geological engineer Shannon Lemke. She joined Vitruvian Exploration this past fall to explore for oil resource plays in the continental U.S. The company was founded by Richard Lane, past exploration head of Southwestern Energy Co., in October 2009. Initially, the company's holdings comprised coalbed-methane assets in West Virginia and Alabama; today, like most companies, its strategy is to find oil.

A native of Michigan, Lemke graduated from Michigan Technological University, where she captained the track and cross country teams. Initially, as she weighed careers, she was put off by the cyclical nature of oil and gas. When Newfield Exploration Co. came to conduct interviews, she didn't sign up. But her professors recommended her to the Newfield geologist heading up the search, who was an alum. Lured by pizza, she attended the presentation, which opened her eyes to the opportunities available at smaller independents: an entrepreneurial culture, earlier responsibility, and on-the-job training instead of more years spent in grad school. She joined Newfield's onshore team after graduation, in 2000.

Significant responsibility did come early. The onshore team was led by Elliot Pew, who later joined Common Resources as president and chief operating officer. First, however, she trained for nine months with the offshore team in reservoir, production and drilling engineering. Then she was teamed with a geophysicist and given a 350-square-mile 3-D data set and told to "find exploration projects."

At the time, Newfield's onshore holdings were largely comprised of Sarita Field, in the Frio Trend in Texas; a Provident City Field joint venture with Shell in the Wilcox Trend; and South Louisiana's Broussard Field. Lemke's focus was the deep-gas Wilcox play in Zapata County, Texas.

By her third year at Newfield she had generated an exploration prospect in Duval County, which the company encouraged her to promote and sell. After some six years working South Texas, she shifted focus to West Texas and the Val Verde Basin, gaining hard rock experience in the Ellenburger. And by the time that Newfield and Anadarko acquired TXCO's Maverick Basin assets in 2009, Lemke was one of two geologists in charge of conventional properties in central, South and West Texas.

In mid-2010, Pew told her about Lane's start-up at Vitruvian. "It was a chance to go back to a smaller company and have more impact," she says.

Lemke is on the undergraduate scholarship foundation of the Houston Geological Society and also coaches in a youth soccer league. She is the mother of four children, aged 3, 5, 8 and 9, with a "wonderful" husband who elected to stay home with them.

In a recent interview with Oil and Gas Investor, the senior geologist talked about the search for oil resource plays.

Investor: Unlike lots of folks in the industry, you don't have family in oil and gas.

Lemke: Right. That's one of the reasons I didn't initially realize how much responsibility I was given early on at Newfield. To be honest, I didn't know any better. I didn't know that someone with three years' experience doesn't typically generate and sell prospects.

During my time there I generated three deep Wilcox prospects and sold them to industry partners. We drilled 55 wells with a 67% success rate. We got to do exploratory drilling and also drill the development wells, so we kept projects through the life cycle, which was fun. Newfield was a great place to work.

Investor: Did selling prospects come naturally to you?

Lemke: I've had some great mentors. Susan Black, now with Cathexis Oil & Gas, taught me how to sell prospects. Engineers tend to be conservative—I learned you have to cut through the details and convey how big something could be. You can get into the details later.

Investor: Where did you focus initially when you joined Vitruvian?

Lemke: My first assignment was to assist the geologist working on the Mississippi Lime acreage in Oklahoma, helping with correlations and also looking at exploring north into Kansas. We have 200,000 net acres and we're drilling and completing wells there currently.

Now I'm working on another very exciting project, but I can't talk about it.

Investor: How do you find new oil resource plays?

Lemke: It's a completely different mindset about project scope and size with the unconventional plays. There aren't any undiscovered basins in the Lower 48. Anything we're looking at, 10 other companies are looking at as well, because everyone is looking for oil.

It's all about moving fast and getting there before someone else—doing good work and delineating areas quickly. It's making something work that someone has worked before, applying technology to make it work better. You go where lots of oil has been found.

And, you have to get into enough opportunities to have a chance of doing well.

Investor: What do you like best about your work?

Lemke: It's exciting to create value, to work mature areas onshore the U.S. and put together large positions where others have already drilled, and find there's a lot left. You're putting data together in a new way.