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40 Years at Prudhoe Bay: Oil field discovery saga spawns MVP Geologists, others say ARCO’s Jamison is individual most responsible for California major’s exploration success on North Slope Rose Ragsdale For Petroleum News
If the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s North Slope was a team effort, then H.C. “Harry” Jamison, a young, mid-career geologist out of California, was unquestionably that team’s most valuable player.
“Without Harry Jamison, there is no question in my mind that Richfield Oil Co. and later Atlantic Richfield Co. would not have had its position at Prudhoe Bay. I consider Jamison the most important single individual in the position Richfield had at Prudhoe Bay,” said C.G. “Gil” Mull, a field geologist who had worked for Richfield and later worked for Humble Oil & Refining Co. when the oil field was discovered in 1968.
In an exploration program, Mull said there is usually no way to say that any one person was responsible for a discovery — because these things are a team effort involving a number of people and events over a period of time — all of which had to occur. “And in some ways the same thing was true for the Prudhoe Bay oil discovery. But, without Harry, a number of the critical events for Richfield would not have occurred. Richfield — and thus ARCO — would not have had its position at Prudhoe Bay had it not been for his push and managerial expertise,” he explained.
Educated in California oil fields Jamison, who attended high school in St. Louis and Beverly Hills, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and saw combat in the Pacific as a second-class radio technician, had earned his geological credentials at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in Richfield Oil Co.’s Cuyama Valley oil field in central California.
Richfield hired Jamison two years after the 1948 discovery of the 400-million-barrel field during an intensive development program that saw the young geologist “sitting” on 15 wells his second day on the job.
Jamison’s boss on that first job in 1950 was an engineer named Mo Benson, who became a pivotal figure in his future in Alaska.
At first, Jamison spent three 24-hour days on the rig and six days “off” in the company’s offices working eight-hour shifts. For 18 months,he held that position, working with petroleum engineers, roughnecks and toolpushers. He then spent six months doing subsurface work in the San Joaquin Valley.
“I was a total greenhorn,” recalled Jamison recently. “I had never been on a rig before. It was a great education.”
Richfield then transferred Jamison and his boss to a two-person office in Olympia, Wash. He spent three years there, including 18 months alone, studying the geology of Washington State.
“I did (plenty of) tough field geology, mapping areas that had never been mapped before. By the time I finished, I had a lot of field experience. That’s because the western part of the state was like a rainforest and as you go into the mountains, the Cascades, it’s more like a high desert environment,” he recalled.
Jamison returned to Los Angeles as an administrative geologist, where he worked for a couple of years before gaining another broadening position as administrative assistant to Mason Hill, Richfield’s manager of exploration.
Jamison journeys to Alaska It was 1960 before Jamison made his first trip to Alaska. He was asked to do troubleshooting on the Katalla-Yakataga project for Richfield with partners Sinclair and British Petroleum.
In early 1961, Richfield decided to reorganize its Alaska operation and put Jamison in charge as exploration supervisor for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest and posted his good friend Ben Ryan to Alaska as district geologist.
“Ben and I were very close. He worked with me in Cuyama for several months and we worked together in Bakersfield. I knew him to be blunt, forthright, and very honest in his opinions and a sound geologist of few words. So when he said something, I listened,” Jamison said.
Richfield, a moderate-size major integrated oil company, was working offshore in Cook Inlet. Besides its 1957 discovery of the Swanson River oil field on the Kenai Peninsula — the first commercial discovery in Alaska — the company had participated with other companies in several successes, including the Beluga River gas field.
Another critical piece of the puzzle fell into place some months later when Richfield’s district geophysicist Charles “Charlie” Selman began to work directly with Jamison and Ryan.
“It was a very positive change. Charlie was a math major from Arkansas State, a good ole Southern boy and a damn good geophysicist. He understood the ramifications of physics but he was an excellent interpreter. Most people would be lost, but Charlie was able to convey what he did in maps and words,” Jamison said.
Selman, Ryan and Jamison became the prime movers in Richfield’s exploration program on the North Slope.
“Ben was close-mouthed, terse, factual and solid in contrast to Charlie, who could tell really good stories,” Jamison recalled. “I think our friendship and ability to work together had a lot to do with what happened on the North Slope.”
Spurred by the promise of more federal land becoming available for exploration, Richfield sent a geological field party to the North Slope in 1963.
Earlier, Richfield has as many as eight geological field parties scattered across Alaska during the summers of 1958, 1959 and 1960. These field parties included two parties on the North Slope in both 1959 and 1960, which had given Richfield the general framework of the region’s geology. Now the company needed to fill in the details between the Colville and Canning rivers, where BLM was promising to offer acreage in 1964.
“We wanted to zero in on that area, though it was expensive. But it was not as expensive as putting together a seismic crew,” Jamison said.
Fateful summer field work The results of the 1963 field work would reverberate through the years
Jamison, who visited Alaska every two or three weeks, sent two young geologists, C.G. “Gil” Mull and Gar Pessel, to the North Slope as co-leaders of the summer field party.
Excited by oil shows in sandy outcrops he and Mull ran across near the Sag River, Pessel penned a letter to his bosses, extolling the potential of the rocks they had seen.
When Ryan and Selman got the letter, they passed it along to Jamison with their endorsements.
When Jamison read Pessel’s letter, he decided to attach a longer missive, outlining the company’s options and recommending seismic coverage of the area. He also warned his bosses that if Richfield did not follow up on the field party’s findings, the company “would be out in the cold.”
“Both Ben and I knew Gil and Gar very well. They knew good rocks when they saw them, and if they had the guts to stand behind their observations, then we could stand behind them,” Jamison said.
Richfield’s managers had just begun to consider possibilities when Selman and Ryan phoned to alert them that a seismic crew would be available if the company moved quickly to secure their services.
Richfield managers become believers Jamison encountered a certain amount of resistance in pushing for more investment in northern Alaska exploration among higher management at Richfield, not only at this point, but throughout his tenure as Alaska district manager, according to Mull.
Richfield’s manager of exploration, Mason Hill, was traveling when Jamison got the call about the seismic crew, so he went to Frank McPhillips, the general manager of land and exploration, and Bill Travers, the executive vice president of exploration and production.
“My job was to convince them that this was an opportunity we could not afford to pass up,” Jamison said.
Richfield hired the United crew.
“There is no doubt that was the turning point,” Jamison recalled. “Without that decision, we would most certainly have become a minor player on the North Slope. This chain of events illustrates that no one person can take credit and say I found Prudhoe Bay.”
Jamison said the teamwork aspect so pervades the story of Prudhoe Bay’s discovery that it may offer more profound insights into how organizations work.
“If a team works well together, sometimes you can come up with successful ideas that move from the bottom to the top. Any interruption or block along the way would have resulted in failure,” he observed.
But failure wasn’t in the tea leaves for Richfield.
Jamison said Richfield shot a line of seismic from the foothills to Prudhoe Bay, across the Prudhoe Bay structure. It also shot a closed anticline, and drilled the Susie State No. 1 well, trying to find the sand that Gar and Gil had been so enthusiastic about.
During this multiyear effort, costs began to mount and Richfield needed a partner.
Jamison said Hill suggested that Richfield approach Humble Oil & Refining Co. (predecessor to ExxonMobil), saying Humble would be a good partner.
Jamison called Humble and J.R. Jackson, Dean Morgridge and Ken Fuller came across the street to meet with Hill and Jamison.
“I showed them our seismic results, which at that time did not include data from the Prudhoe Bay area, and the samples that Gar and Gil had sent back from the Sag River. Those samples had 2 Darcies of permeability. You could practically blow through them, and they had oil stain,” Jamison recalled.
Persuaded, the Humble trio traveled east to company headquarters in Houston and recommended to their board of directors that Humble partner with Richfield and leave Richfield as operator of the North Slope venture.
Humble’s board agreed.
“They paid us quite a bonus and became our 50 percent partner,” Jamison said.
For that simple act of faith and a few million dollars, Humble (later Exxon) would reap billions.
Richfield merges with Atlantic Refining Jamison continued to lead the charge as Richfield cleared more hurdles in the years leading up to the oil field’s discovery. These included hiring a second seismic crew for the winter of 1964-65, acquiring more federal acreage from BLM, drilling the disappointing Susie well.
“Everybody had basically given up, going into the period in 1966 when Richfield was acquired by Atlantic Refining,” he recalled. “We were shaking in our boots. I was really concerned. I had seven children.”
After the merger, Jamison was again tapped to manage the Alaska district.
In addition to his reputation at Richfield, Jamison said he believes the impression he made on Louis Davis, Atlantic Richfield Co.’s vice president of exploration, during a three-hour, one-on-one meeting gave him a leg up in securing the appointment.
But it was his first boss, Benson, who made the final decision to re-appoint Jamison as Alaska district manager, after ARCO Chairman and CEO Robert O. Anderson told him to find the “brightest” person he could to run the Alaska operation.
As district manager, Jamison was the point person for merging the Richfield and Atlantic Refining organizations.
“That time was like walking on eggshells. It was tough, putting two groups together,” he said.
Atlantic Refining was a larger organization with procedures in place, so “it was a steep learning curve for us Richfield guys,” Jamison recalled.
Fortunately, Atlantic’s people were just as enthusiastic about the North Slope’s potential as Richfield’s staff.
“We had good vibes between us. We had discovered the Trading Bay field in Cook Inlet that summer after the merger,” Jamison said.
It was a Union Oil explorationist who told Jamison during a plane ride back to Los Angeles that “he would drink all the oil that anyone finds on the North Slope.”
As outrageous as his attitude sounds today, it was understandable at the time.
“The general knowledge of logistics, drilling, expenditures, climate and weather of Alaska was virtually nil, even in Alaska,” Jamison said. “Very few people, even residents of Fairbanks, had knowledge of the North Slope. It was really telling that once you flew over Bettles, you would not see a single light all the way north to the coast. If the Prudhoe Bay well hadn’t come in or been encouraging, it would have written ‘finit’ to the (industry’s North Slope exploration) effort at least for a number of years.”
But Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 did find a big oil field, and the rest, as they say, is history.
After Prudhoe Bay Jamison continued to serve as Alaska district manager for ARCO during the tumultuous months after the discovery in 1968 and 1969. He was then transferred to Dallas and became Alaska coordinator.
In 1970, Jamison was seconded to Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. for two years, where he worked to gain congressional passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
In 1973, he returned to Dallas to become vice president and chief geologist in ARCO’s North American producing division. “I greatly enjoyed that job. We had lots of activity, good budgets and good people,” he recalled.
In 1980, ARCO asked Jamison to take over as district manager for the Rocky Mountain District in Denver and to supervise exploration for the central and western United States. He said he found the hybrid job a challenge, especially trying to put together an exploration group by drawing on the resources of other districts.
Then in May 1981, he was promoted to senior vice president of Atlantic Richfield Co., and appointed president of a new company he was charged with creating — ARCO Exploration Co.
“I stayed for four years, and we found a number of modest-size oil fields scattered around the country,” he said.
In 1985, the oil industry underwent a major retrenchment and Jamison was offered a golden parachute to retire at age 60 with the same benefits he would have enjoyed at age 65. He took the offer and immediately began working as a consultant. That work continued for the next eight years and included a couple of special projects on the North Slope for the U.S. Department of Energy, Jamison said.
Jamison’s role key to ARCO’s success
Despite his quiet exit from ARCO many years later, Mull and others say Jamison remains the guiding force behind the fateful events that culminated with the giant oil field’s discovery.
Mull lists Jamison’s major contributions as follows:
• “It was Jamison who personally pushed to get the second Richfield surface geological mapping field party on the North Slope in 1963 — against some amount of resistance in the company, from people who thought that Cook Inlet was the only place to be working. And it was on that summer field party that we found two oil-saturated sandstone outcrops that had never previously been seen.
• “Harry then took the information about the oil-saturated sandstone that Gar Pessel found and other favorable indications, and at the proper time convinced high-level management that the company needed to have a seismic geophysical exploration crew that coming winter if we were going to be successful in exploration on the North Slope.
• “Again, he did an admirable job of selling the idea to management at the proper time. It was that seismic crew that the following winter ran the first seismic survey for Richfield across the Prudhoe Bay structure and that influenced the bidding that Richfield and Humble did in the first Prudhoe Bay oil and gas lease sale, in which the two companies in partnership acquired the leases across the highest part of the Prudhoe Bay structure. (This was before the merger with Atlantic Refining Co.)
• “Harry also played a role in arriving at the successful bids that Richfield/Humble submitted for those leases. The Atlantic Refining Co. bids on the same tract were way, way low, and if it were not for the Richfield/Humble leases, the merged Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO) would not have had its large position in the field. Instead, British Petroleum and other companies would have had the majority of the field, and ARCO would have been a minor player in the area.
• “ARCO senior managers would have had nothing to sell when they sold ARCO, a profitable company out from under the employees in 2000, if it had not been for things that Harry Jamison did 40-plus years ago,” Mull concludes.
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