Oil exploration: Digging deep for success
Susan Morrice discovered oil in Belize against all the odds. She has a deep belief in its transformational powers, says Fearghal O'Connor.
If Susan Morrice shares anything with JR Ewing, it is her unfounded joy at striking oil against all the odds. But that is where the comparison must end. For one, the Belfast-born chairman of Belize Natural Energy (BNE), says she has never before heard the term "oil lady",given that the oil and gas exploration industry has always had something of a male aura.
And the Trinity College-educated geologist believes that passion is a much more important factor than gender when it comes to success in what is a very tough business. When Morrice and her company finally struck oil in Belize at the end of June 2005, after years telling a disbelieving oil industry that the search would be successful, passion was not in short supply.
After many years of hoping, the final success came rapidly. Usually it takes between 10 and 15 wells in an area before you hit anything. But BNE's very first well was a success.
"It was unbelievable although I shouldn't use that word because it was belief that got us there," shesays. "We hit this wonderful beach sand - just like Magilligan Beach in Derry where I used to play as a child. Beautiful porous sand and the light sweet oil came in. It was like all our birthdays in a row at once and there was a giant realisation that what was supposed to be impossible had happened."
What made the moment even more poignant was that BNE struck oil on the first anniversary of the death of Morrice's Belizean business partner and great friend Mike Usher, who had long championed the notion of finding oil in his country.
There's oil in them there hills!
Morrice's passion extends to Northern Ireland
Susan Morrice may have moved to the United States 30 years ago but she has retained close ties with Northern Ireland over the years. Indeed she is planning to become involved with a drive to regenerate entrepreneurship there in the near future.
It is a very different place to the strife-torn province she left in the mid-70s and, while the troubles were not necessarily her main reason for leaving, she says it was great to get a global perspective.
"I later had the opportunity to go back with President Clinton and Ron Brown who was the secretary of commerce and actually play quite an important role. I was exploring and drilling wells in a big cross-border project - the northwest carboniferous basin which took in Cavan, Fermanagh and Leitrim. Amazingly enough, this basin has half a million acres in Northern Ireland and half a million acres in southern Ireland. I was asked to go and represent the US in an effort to develop the economy. The development of an economy, of course, is the key to the underpinning of a successful country."
As with Belize, she strongly believes in the potential for gas in the northwest carboniferous basin.
"Marathon drilled it about 40 years ago," she says. "I know there is gas in it but the timing, the technology, the pricing and the right partners have to come together. It's an alignment. When I was there 15 or 20 years ago, people hadn't appreciated that natural gas is the clean fuel of today for electrical generation. Also the technologies to fracture and open rocks and make them flow more economically hadn't come to the fore.
"And, of course, Northern Ireland was steeped in its own situation. But the time will be right for this basin very soon. It needs the right partners who really want to do it - not just for the money but to really bring a platform to the economy that allows entrepreneurship, cheaper electricity etc. It is not just about gas - it is about everything associated with it."
"We jokingly named the well the Mike Usher Gusher," she says. "Of course environmental concerns won't allow you to let it gush these days, but we now have 10 Mike Usher Gushers in the Spanish Lookout field."
The discovery was far more than a personal triumph and vindication for Morrice. It has already begun to transform the economy in Belize.By September 2008, crude oil sales accounted for almost 60% of Belize's export earnings. BNE now employs approximately 400 people, 95% of whom are Belizean.There are approximately 20 million barrels of oil in recoverable reserves inthe country - 14 million in the Spanish Lookout field and five million in the more recent Never Delay field. As 2010 is the final year of BNE's exploration contract, the company plans to press ahead with its exploration and production work making investments of $25m to look for new oil prospects and $6m to purchase its own drilling rig, so it will no longer have to lease it fromabroad. Through a joint venture agreement, BNE has a 54% working interest inthe oil field, the Government of Belize owns 10%, and Morrice's husband'scompany CHx owns 36%.
Not everyone in Belize is happy with the arrangement and some believe that the government did not get enough of a share from BNE. But Morrice dismisses this as little more than party politics by "asplinter group".
"The prime minister himself has aligned himself very carefully and clearly with BNE because he knows it is the backbone of the economy," she says. "The Belize Government has done a really good job and we have been criticised by some for actually giving up too much. For example, they have increased our tax base from a gross tax of 1.5% to 40%. It's always a balance because Belize is competing with every other country in the world for exploration dollars.Remember Belize had no oil. It's take from this oil is 58% which compares very favourably with elsewhere."
She points out that in less than three years, oil has become the number-one revenue generator in the whole country.
"Belize, like many countries, has gone through a really difficult year and if it did not have this oil revenue, I don't know what would happen. But this discovery is transforming the country in a number of different ways."
Apart from the revenue it generates,Morrice is particularly enthused about an initiative called the Belize Dream Trust. It is a special revenue stream from the oil that is being put into education and preserving the country's pristine environment. It will pay fortraining across a range of sectors and also fund micro-financing to help give those with an entrepreneurial flair in the country a start.
Countries in Africa where oil has also been discovered are already in discussion with Morrice about how they can implement a similar programme to bring the benefits of a discovery directly to the people. And she passionately believes that the resources being pumped from beneath the soil of Belize can have a hugely positive impact on all of that country's 320,000 people.
"Something like this can give a country its self respect and a self sufficiency. It can set free what you might call the entrepreneurial spirit, that spark that in too many countries gets dampened by too many aid programmes or reliance on government funds."
Morrice's belief in the powers of the entrepreneurial spirit go back at least 18 years to what she says is one of the highlights of a long and varied career that has brought her around the globe.Having settled in Denver, Colorado,she was asked by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists to head up its international committee in the run-up to its annual convention in the Rocky Mountain state. She says that her travels led her to have a brain wave.
"I could see all of these opportunities in countries who financially could not develop the expertise to develop their oil and gas potential," she says. "Meanwhile, I would go back home to the United States and I would see all of these unemployed geologists and geophysicists in the downturn of the oil industry. So I thought ‘this is daft - how do we get everybody together?'.
"I decided to invite every country in the world to come to Denver to exhibit their oil and gas opportunities in a pavillion. We sent out letters through the UN, the World Bank and all sorts of ways. 52 countries came that first year and it was a huge success. We even got letters back from tiny countries saying ‘we have no oil and gas but if you think we have, could you let us know'. That international pavillion idea has since become hugely successful and has been copied at other events in London and elsewhere.
"Billions of barrels of oil have been discovered from it. Exploration companies from the US have had the money and the expertise and they joined forces in partnerships with countries all over the world through this."
Morrice's own partnership with Belize began 28 years ago, following a conversation with English author, inventor, financier and latterly oil explorer, Sir Ian Rankin. He had just holidayed in Belize and asked Morrice did she believe there was oil in that country. She went to a library in Denver and began the first steps in her long investigations.
"They had lots of old geology reports from the days before 1981 when Belize was British Honduras," she says. "But they had one brand new report by a geologist who had linked the geology down through oil-rich Mexico through Guatemala and into Belize. It allowed me to visualise the region as it had been 100 million years ago and I knew that there had to be oil in Belize."
After travelling to the country she fell in love with it and its people and it was then that she meant Mike Usher who was evangelical in his belief in Belizean oil and its power to transform the country.
"Just being down there, it was like meeting a young teenager with piles of potential who doesn't realise it yet. But there had been 50 oil companies at least and about 52 dry holes all over the country and everybody, including the ministers in Belize, thought there was no oil. The oil companies were saying 'Susan get a life, give up Belize, you're ruining your career'. But I knew that they had also said the same thing about the international pavillion. Everybody said it was impossible to invite the world to come to Denver but it happened. Our greatest challenge is recognising the potential of the power of our own minds when our doubts hold us back."
She says she recently sat watching the movie Invictus through floods of tears. It documents Nelson Mandela's belief against the odds that rugby, the white man's game, could save South Africa. She says it reminded her of her own conviction that oil could transform Belize when few believed her.
"I didn't see it as a risk. But I had to go against everybody, my family, my colleagues, in this belief that oil existed in Belize and it was there for the good of all. There is a loneliness in this business when when you go against the big oil companies with all of their experience. Nobody would invest with us so we went back to Ireland to a group of investors who believed in what we were trying to do. And then after about 15 years of marriage, my husband, who had long thought my obsession with oil in Belize was nuts, decided that his company would take a 40% share in Belize Natural Energy."
Presumably, few husbands have ever been so happy that they finally listened to their wife. JR Ewing probably should take note.
