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Mark Armentrout was recently quoted in the Houston Chronicle in an article about deregulation in Texas. The article claimed that electricity deregulation is failing to make power more reliable or less costly.  In Mark’s role as former chairman of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and currently role as president of the energy/technology consulting firm Texas Technology Partners, Mark was quoted saying that “investor-owned utility executives face tough choices weighing reliability improvements against cost.”  US Securities and Exchange Commission records show pay packages de-emphasize reliability in favor of profits, according to the article, and after a decade of electricity deregulation in Texas, the state’s power supplies are left vulnerable as Texas continues to grow.  

Reporters often contact Mark because of his experience at ERCOT, although he no longer has a direct interest in ERCOT.  Now most of Mark’s client base includes renewable start-ups including wind, solar, biomass and retailers specializing in renewables.  There have also been some research and government clients.  “My services include management advice on how to get started, i.e. how does the ERCOT grid work technically, governmentally, and from a business planning standpoint.  The US and Canada have 3 AC grids, each with DC ties: East, West and ERCOT.  So Texas is free from most FERC jurisdiction.”  This freedom has been one of the catalysts to make Texas a leader in renewable energy.

“If Texas were an independent country, we would rank fifth in the world in terms of wind generation capacity…only China, India, Spain and Germany have more. Texas has nearly a third of the nation’s wind energy.  We take it very seriously.  And we have learned to manage its variability since the wind does not always blow.  It is a management challenge that ERCOT stepped up to and met,” explains Mark.  Now however, with long-term gas prices so low, ERCOT’s electricity prices are also lower, since gas is the swing fuel in ERCOT.  So between the uncertainty of federal production tax credits and low prices, new renewable development is slowing down.

Mark started with ARCO in Dallas in 1976 at the age of 20, working as the lead programmer on the Prudhoe Bay maintenance system.  In 1977, he travelled to Prudhoe to implement the maintenance system and train the maintenance supervisors.  Mark spent his entire 24-year ARCO career in Information Technology. He held management positions in Dallas, Midland, Plano, Houston and Anchorage. His responsibilities in the 90’s included IT functions worldwide for E&P.  

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Paul La Pointe (pictured left) worked at ARCO until 1991 but still completed fractured reservoir projects for the company until it became a subsidiary of BP. He continues to do work that involves old ARCO mates from Plano, Texas, and elsewhere, he says, though not directly for them.

“It is more like I run into ARCO Alumni all the time, such as when we were presenting a fractured reservoir study to Hess last year in Houston,” Paul says. “Who should walk into the meeting as one of the reviewers but Fred Dula, recently hired away from Shell. Fred and I worked in the same group, Structural Geology Research, in Plano for a couple years and in related groups after that.”

Recently, Paul uploaded a new picture to his Arco Alumni profile. While it might look like he’s on a tropical vacation, the trip was actually work-related. “The photo was shot in Papua New Guinea, where I was part of a small field party doing mapping and fracture characterization for InterOil,” he says.

Paul and two other geologists were led by “five guys from a local village who hacked paths through the jungle for us to get to outcrops and collect samples,” he says. The picture shows Paul standing next to an outcrop on a river they reached by paddling in a pirogue. “My field book is showing the orientation of the bedding relative to the fractures,” he says.

The group had a system for traveling through the jungle. “First, we would drop off the locals with their machetes,” Paul says. “They would build a camp out of the jungle in a day or two. Then we would get dropped off by helicopter at the camp.” They usually spotted the outcrops by air or traveled by motorized rowboat or pirogue along the rivers.

Paul’s Papua New Guinea adventure is just one of many services that he and his current employer, Golder Associates, provide to the industry. “[The company’s] FracMan Technology Group is the premier consultancy, we think, in fractured reservoir characterization, static and dynamic modeling,” Paul says.

After joining Golder in 1992, Paul collaborated with two other key players already at the company to develop and commercialize Discrete Fracture Network modeling, a technology that revolutionized the way fractured reservoirs are now modeled, he explains. The fieldwork aspect of his job takes Paul to some interesting places, such as Papua New Guinea, and the Uinta Basin in Utah, where he characterized and made models of tight gas hydro fracturing in the Mesaverde.

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AWS and the Deloitte and Chevron Alumni communities are featured in the Houston Chronicle in February 2010.  Read about Deloitte and Chevron.

Logon today to read about ARCO alumni. Click on profiles to read about alumni and their latest activities and click on Members and Whos Doing What for quick snapshots on the entire membership population!                   

AWS works to put key experienced talent to work for your company. Learn more today.

Alumni Web Services (AWS) provides alumni networking sites and valuable human resource databases. AWS is now heavily involved with a number of key clients mining these databases and presenting key candidates for a variety of roles.

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An important part of BP’s rapid exploration and production growth – with annual project spend of around US $6 billion –is enhancing our project and engineering capability. World-class engineering leaders are needed to help us realise our vision as we invest heavily in new technology. Our business is the exploration, production, refining, trading and distribution of energy. This is what we do, and we do it on a truly global scale.

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