Oil Patch Insider

Prank involving Reggie’s ‘remains’ inflames GO-Expo organizers; Ehm named president of Fowler Oil & Gas (Alaska), moving ahead with coalbed methane in Mat-Su

It was the oil and gas show of the year in Canada.

More than 600 exhibitors and 21,000 visitors from 54 countries registered for the three-day Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 (GO-Expo) in Calgary.

Fertile ground for deal-making and apparently for pranksters.

S.K. Wolff and Florian Osenberg, aka Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, aka (and apparently these are their real names) Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, somehow sold themselves as genuine to organizers.

They landed a spot on the GO-Expo program to make a presentation to an audience of about 250 who had paid C$45 each in expectation of hearing major policy announcements from representatives of ExxonMobil and the U.S. National Petroleum Council on oil sands development and biofuels.

As the Yes Men, the pair has previously pulled stunts on the World Trade Organization, the British Broadcasting Corp. and various conferences, ridiculing the actions of corporations and governments.

GO-Expo “was a great opportunity for us, like the holy grail really,” said Servin. “We’ve never had an audience like this.

“These people are wrecking the Earth and they’re quite conscious of it,” he said, after he and his sidekick were bundled off the stage by security guards once GO-Expo organizers realized they’d been duped.

The police were called and, although no charges were laid, the Yes Men were ordered to pay a C$287 fine for trespassing.

Later they promoted their book and showed a documentary of their hoaxes at a theater in downtown Calgary.

Red-faced representatives of GO-Expo organizers DMG World Media issued a profuse apology, saying they made “every attempt to verify the legitimacy and credibility of (conference) speakers …”

Servin said the Yes Men were invited to GO-Expo after organizers checked out a Web site (http://www.vivoleum.com/event/) the pair had developed, including a PowerPoint presentation by Servin outlining how the remains of human beings who died as a result of climate-change disasters could be converted into an alternative fuel called “vivoleum” that would eventually replace oil.

Using volunteers, they distributed candles supposedly made of vivoleum to the audience.

They encouraged those attending to light the candles, affirming they were made from the remains of ExxonMobil maintenance worker “Reggie Watts,” who was said to have bequeathed his body to be used by the company for fuel.

In case there were any lingering doubts, DMG said in a statement that the “environmental and corporate ethics activists” were not representatives of either ExxonMobil or the NPC.

—Gary Park

Arlen Ehm named president of Fowler Oil & Gas (Alaska); company moving ahead with coalbed methane we

A petroleum geologist with bachelor‘s and master’s degrees from Wichita State University, Ehm began his career in the oil and gas industry when he got out of the U.S. Army, working as a roughneck on drilling rigs in the Mid-Continent.

“I didn’t want to go to school right away, but after seeing how good the geologists had it — sitting in the dog house and getting paid more, while I was out on the rig floor getting cold and wet — I went to school. By the time I went to work as a geologist, the roughnecks were making more than the geologists,” Ehm said in a June 20 interview with Petroleum News.

Ehm’s career in Alaska began in 1965 when he went to work for Shell and was on the first well drilled from the first platform in Cook Inlet. Since then he has been on wells in various parts of the state, conducted geological field parties and created numerous proprietary reports alone and with partners. One of these is a study of the surface geology of the 1002 area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Ehm was recently vice president, Alaska for Pelican Hill Oil and Gas, a California company that drilled two wells in the Cook Inlet basin in search for natural gas. When the company left the state, Ehm went back to consulting, which he has been doing in Alaska for 31 years.

Fowler Oil and Gas is preparing to drill a vertical trunk well and then lateral wellbores off the trunk. The well will be drilled this summer in the Kircher block, which consists of 840 acres of forest and farmland at the corner of Bogard Road and Trunk Road between Wasilla and Palmer. The land at that intersection is owned by four families who have agreed to Fowler’s plan. The pilot drill will be in the 580-acre Kircher farm.

The production well will have no surface impact, no noise and no water to the surface making it completely environmentally friendly and in conformance with all the regulations of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the company said.

Fowler’s development plan will be introduced at the borough’s planning commission meeting on Aug. 6, and a public hearing will be held on Aug. 20.

Fowler, a graduate of Palmer High School and a longtime Alaskan, told Petroleum News May 2 that he fully understands the concerns of the residents of the Mat-Su area regarding coalbed methane development. (See original story on this company in the May 6 issue of Petroleum News at http://www.petroleumnews.com/pnads/611801213.shtml.)

“Our family has been in the valley for over 50 years and so I’m very familiar with the issues up in the valley and how people would like to see economic development but also coupled with environmental protection,” Fowler said May 2.

Fowler Oil & Gas (Alaska) LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fowler Oil & Gas Corp., headquartered in Las Vegas, Nev. The parent company is majority-controlled by Fowler Family Trusts.

—Kay Cashman