The son of a doctor and a nurse, Canadian-born oilman is now chief executive of US player Greenfields Petroleum and focused on the Bahar project
Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, John Harkins is the second of six children born into a medical family, with a doctor for a father and a nurse for a mother.
Harkins tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, but the medical profession did not manage to draw him in. Instead, he went for a career that keeps him on his toes and has kept him chasing one project for eight years.
“My father told me once that there are only two professions in this world — a doctor and a lawyer. I ended up being neither,” says Harkins, the chief executive of US junior Greenfields Petroleum.
Fort McMurray stint
At 18, Harkins moved to Fort McMurray in Alberta for an entry-level job at Amoco, one of the group of multinational oil companies known as the Seven Sisters that dominated the market until the 1970s.
Northern Alberta was a long way from the city where he grew up.
“I remember I was taller than most of the trees around Fort McMurray. Very strange place, I thought. But, I got a job with Amoco there,” he says.
Harkins remembers himself as being a roughneck in those days.
“I even drove a D9 Caterpillar (tractor). I did every odd job. It was so interesting because it was the first time I thought about what I wanted to do when I 'grow up’,” he says.
He stayed with the company, which was later acquired by supermajor BP, for a year and a half before he applied to the University of Toronto to get a degree in chemical engineering.
“I went back to Toronto with a bunch of money and applied to go to college,” Harkins says. “My parents didn’t quite understand what I did. But coming back to Toronto was great, because my dad was a professor at the university, so he could see what I was about.”
After university, in the early 1980s, Harkins returned to the oil and gas business. However, his post-university career coincided with major changes in Canada’s energy policy. The new National Energy Program purported to prevent oil price shocks but in Harkins' view “destroyed" the domestic industry.
“I was lucky enough that Amoco was looking for people to go and work internationally. I moved with them to Houston. I was 23 to 24 years old at the time, and I was getting assignments around the world. You really got to go everywhere. It was a great experience that big companies could afford to do,” he recalls.
Valuable experience
Harkins spent the next seven years training in every aspect of the industry, working in Hong Kong, Trinidad, Mexico and Barbados. After 16 years, he left Amoco and went to work with TransCanada Pipelines and then Anadarko, before setting the scene for his job today.
In 2009, he started Greenfields Petroleum, a single-asset company focused on the Bahar offshore area in Azerbaijan. The new company acquired a one-third stake in Bahar Energy Limited, with two Azeri partners holding one third each.
“We originally were three partners. Two of them bought each other out. Then the last one filed for bankruptcy. We are now 80% owner, together with (Azeri state oil company) Socar on 20%,” he says.
“We had to get rid of the partner problems, the old cost problems, and do our technical homework."
Harkins had to rebuild the company during the prolonged industry downturn, significantly reducing both its workforce and operating expenses.
“First thing I did when I had control back was cut costs by 75%. We cut our employee numbers by 50%, from 1500 to 811. Next year, we’re probably going to go down to around 700 as we focus our business even more,” Harkins says.
“We strived to make the company profitable in a $40 per barrel-oil price environment. On the face of slightly increasing oil, or what I would call ‘firming' oil prices, it is a good time to be in the business.”
Harkins could be right. After years of getting established, Greenfields appears to be taking off, with the company holding a significant share of the Bahar oil and gas fields in the shallow-water Caspian Sea, north of the prolific Shah Deniz area.
“We have an oilfield and a gas field. In the oilfield, we have standard re-completions. We generate about 1000 barrels per day. In the gas field, we have re-completions as well, and right now, we are producing 20 million cubic feet per day and we can grow that slowly,” he says.
He plans to increase oil production to 6000 bpd in the next two to three years.
“That will fund a lot of other things,” he says.
Socar plans to drill deep gas wells at the Bahar project and Harkins says there is potential for Miocene oil exploration as well.
“We will let someone else farm in and fund this potential. We’re already talking to big players in the area about this,” he says.
Partner in industry
Harkins lives in Texas with his family.
“Along the way, I met my wife, who was working in the industry at the time with BP in Texas as an analyst.”
They have two children who are following in their parents' footsteps, “but of their own accord”, Harkins says with a smile.
His weekends are often spent travelling with his family.
“My son and I went salmon fishing a while back. We caught 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of salmon and brought it home. Now, every Sunday night, we barbecue salmon.”
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