A friend of the journal

Oct. 26, 2009
Publishing Oil & Gas Journal magazine and web site has always been a challenging and rewarding task for the small group of people whose names you see on the masthead.

Publishing Oil & Gas Journal magazine and web site has always been a challenging and rewarding task for the small group of people whose names you see on the masthead.

The group of editors, reporters, and correspondents has been minimal compared with the magnitude of the task, but that fraternity depends on a much larger cadre of individuals: our sources in the industry.

With mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, new startups, oil and gas price fluctuations, technology development, and so on, just keeping up with sources is a time-consuming job.

Yet a relatively small number of folks in the industry make unusually selfless and long-lasting efforts to keep in touch with OGJ and help us understand the trends, technologies, economics, and other complexities that make up the industry we cover.

At some point we began referring to those folks as "Friends of the Journal." The late Edward F. Durkee was one of those friends.

The exploration life

OGJ doesn't publish obituaries, but Durkee's business partner Selmer Pederson wrote a memorial to him in the October 2009 issue of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin.

The memorial was updated with information provided by Durkee's daughter, Debora, and Dr. Tom Haskell of New Zealand.

Durkee wasn't president of a major oil company or an emir or sheikh or sultan, just a geologist who knew geology and economics and the exploration business inside-out.

He was engaged at one time or another in exploration on nearly every continent except Antarctica, and at the same time he was often working prospects of his own in the US.

He was involved in oil and gas exploration since graduating from the University of Wyoming in 1952.

The man

Durkee was born in 1928 in Midwest, Wyo., son of an oil rig builder, roustabout, and pumper in Salt Creek and Lance Creek oil fields.

Besides his geology shingle, he had a masters in paleontology. Durkee had a good grasp of geophysics, and in his last decade he made considerable efforts—mainly with the aid of Al Gallagher of Denver—toward understanding and integrating surface geochemical exploration methods for which Durkee earlier expressed skepticism.

Durkee participated in a Papua New Guinea promotional effort that was reported, Pederson wrote, to have been "the most successful World Bank project of its type to that time, with new exploration investment amounting to $500 million and resulting in several significant discoveries in subsequent years."

Pederson continued: "He traveled the world visiting national oil company offices, negotiating with same, and had friends on all the continents. He was a gentleman and a scholar and became a close friend with all the international petroleum people he had the pleasure of meeting and discussing their petroleum potential in the world economic market."

Durkee and OGJ

No one here now can remember how long Durkee maintained contact with OGJ editors. He lived most of his later life in Manila, where he opened a consulting office in 1994, and was involved in exploration throughout Southeast Asia.

His written contributions go back at least to 1985, when he cowrote an exploration article on the Papuan basin. We also published his articles on Turkey, Myanmar, and several on the Philippines.

In the Myanmar piece, Durkee described a primitive, integrated oil industry with exploration, drilling, oil production, transportation, refining, marketing, and distribution (OGJ, Oct. 20, 1997, p. 63). He came upon the thriving operation, which has no connection with Myanmar's national oil company, on a trek into the remote Chindwin basin 150 miles northwest of Mandalay.

Durkee was a prolific writer, and OGJ wasn't his only publisher. In the early 1980s he contributed chapters to the former World Energy Developments issue of the AAPG Bulletin, in which a series of detailed articles described exploration and development activity in the world's basins for the previous year.

An OGJ editor could encounter Durkee in the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna or in downtown Perth or trudging the streets of Salt Lake City at 6:30 a.m. after a doctor told him he must "walk or die." He staved off the end until June 1, 2009.

As Pederson pointed out, Durkee "participated in international activities to the fullest and to the last moment, vis-a-vis his latest article in OGJ, May 25, 2009, titled 'Smallest Philippine block has shallow gas, deep reef potential,'" with coauthor Jhana Hale of Manila.

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