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Fairweather E&P becomes Alaska’s first oilfield operations contractor for hire Anchorage-based company offers broad palette of oilfield services; E&P customers include EnCana, Phillips, BP, Unocal, XTO, Aurora Gas Steve Sutherlin PNA Managing Editor
Fairweather E&P Services Inc. pioneered an entirely new category of oilfield service firms in Alaska, the contract operator for hire. Smaller oil companies can avoid the expense and lead time required to operate in Alaska’s oil fields by hiring an experienced and established firm to provide complete exploration and production services.
Fairweather E&P offers management and contracting services, including drilling engineering and supervision, offshore shallow hazard and geotechnical surveys, permitting and regulatory coordination, production operations, remote location logistics, facilities decommissioning, and well abandonment, the company said. Turnkey operations include exploration drilling, well abandonment and facilities decommissioning.
Here come the independents Oilfield operations is perhaps the logical outgrowth of the decades of experience the Fairweather group of companies have built in Alaska, coupled with the evolution of the region as an oil province.
“We’re a very mature oil field up here; the big fields are depleting and there doesn’t seem to be as much interest in the big companies to go out and do exploring now that the elephants are gone,” said Bill Penrose, senior project manager for Fairweather E&P.
Penrose was Fairweather’s project manager for turnkey drilling of the offshore ARCO Alaska Inc. Warthog No. 1 in Camden Bay, and is a former ARCO Alaska senior drilling engineer.
“We tend to provide services to the smaller companies that the bigger companies already have an in-house staff for,” he said. “The little companies coming in need our help. … The big ones don’t need a lot of help; they just need the small specialized stuff that we can provide.”
26 years of Alaska oil field experience Fairweather E&P is part of a group of interrelated companies that share resources and expertise to provide a wide assortment of services to clients. Specialized sister companies include Fairweather Pacific LLC, Fairweather Marine Inc., Fairweather Geophysical LLC and Fairweather International Inc.
The Fairweather group of companies began in 1976 with Fairweather Inc., operating remote airstrips and providing expediting and logistics services. As client needs dictated, the firm added services such as remote site emergency medical personnel and facilities, weather observation, weather forecasts and ice information.
“We started a marine company in 1990, a small marine service company that provides charter services for the oil industry and construction industry in Southcentral Alaska,” said Sherron Perry, president of Fairweather Inc.
“We started E&P in 1993 — it has grown to be rather large, providing services for the oil and mining industries. In 1998 we started Fairweather Geophysical (which) has a joint venture with Kuukpik Corp., the Native corporation in Kaktovik, with a multi-year contract with Phillips doing 3D seismic on the North Slope.”
Fairweather Inc. has had employees in Canada, Japan, Dubai, Point Lay and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Perry said.
“E&P has offices in Anchorage and Houston and we operate in California as well,” said Robert Gardner, president of Fairweather E&P. “Collectively the offices have 140 employees.”
Gardner said three offices offer staffing flexibility and a broad base of in house expertise.
Fairweather E&P began with one-week desk operations, Penrose said, and grew gradually until one project vaulted the company to a new level.
“The watershed was in ‘97 when we ended up working with ARCO, drilling a Beaufort Sea well for them — it moved us up a notch into much bigger projects. It was a turnkey project. We got all the permits, mobilized the vessel, drilled the well and demobilized the rig,” he said.
The Warthog well was drilled with the Glomar Beaufort Sea I CIDS (concrete island drilling system). ExxonMobil has since purchased the CIDS, changed its name to Orlan, which means eagle in Russian, and moved it to Sakhalin.
“We’re working projects several orders of magnitude larger than we used to, with some of the larger outfits: EnCana, Phillips, BP, Unocal, XTO out in Cook Inlet, Aurora Gas, pretty much the industry as a whole here in the state of Alaska,” Penrose said.
Back in Sakhalin Fairweather has recently returned to the oilfields of Sakhalin Island, providing medical services to Sakhalin Energy Investment Co., a joint venture of Royal Dutch Shell. Fairweather provided medical services to Marathon Oil Co. in Sakhalin from 1994 to 1998, and, Perry said, the company has learned how to operate profitably in that challenging province.
“We’re gonna make another run at it,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of development over there and it’s pretty much under way now, but in the big picture it’s just beginning.
“With Exxon starting a big project as well, there’s a lot of activity that’s going to happen over there in the next 20 years.”
Sherron said he has an interest in each of the Fairweather companies, which share clerical and support staff located in Fairweather Inc.’s Anchorage office.
“I have partners in each of the companies that have the specialized skills, education and training for the scope of work that we specialize in,” he said.
“We have synergy,” Gardner said. “We can all draw from the strengths of the other Fairweather companies and their disciplines, and put together a pretty convincing team.”
He said “the Fairweather companies combined have 241 employees. In the winter when Fairweather Geophysical is most active the ranks swell by another 120 employees.”
“I think our greatest overall achievement is getting very good competent employees to work with us and stay with us,” Perry said. “Without great employees you can’t sustain any kind of operation, particularly in a small market like Alaska.”
Perry said the company has a simple recipe for success.
“We treat all of our employees like we like to be treated ourselves,” he said.
“We’re a pretty result-oriented operation. We look at the objective, probably more than some of our competitors do, as opposed to the task of the day.”
Gardner said the company has a number of exciting projects on the horizon, but he declined to talk about them because of client confidentiality considerations.
“Our clients trust us to keep a lot of things confidential,” he said. “That’s one of the things we sell — hire us and your secrets are safe with us. We refer anything in the way of information on what we’re doing to the clients to release.”
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