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Told last fall he urgently needed open-heart surgery, Curtis Burton headed instead to meet with investors in Alaska.
He returned and checked into St. Luke’s Hospital for a quintuple bypass in late November.
Two days after leaving the hospital, he was back in the office.
A week and a half after that, he and his wife, Emalee, hosted their annual Christmas party.
Burton, a friend notes, “is very success-oriented.”
That drive took Burton from a childhood in rural Mississippi, through the ranks of some of the world’s largest energy companies and a succession of start-ups and turnarounds. His work as a founder of DeepStar, a research collaborative into deep-water drilling, earned him a place in the Offshore Energy Hall of Fame.
His latest venture, Buccaneer Energy, works in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, long abandoned by bigger companies for the North Slope.
Now 57, Burton is the consummate energy entrepreneur, always chasing a challenge.
And Buccaneer, founded in 2006, has provided plenty.
Burton ticks them off: It started with no capital. No properties. And within two years, the recession had hit and natural gas prices were headed down.
Buccaneer hunts properties that bigger companies no longer want but which still have unexploited reserves. Early on, it worked in the Gulf of Mexico and onshore coastal areas.
By 2009, stung by the recession and plummeting natural gas prices, Buccaneer needed a new strategy.
But when a consultant suggested Alaska, Burton balked.
“It’s too cold. It’s too remote,” he thought. “Too many polar bears. Too many regulatory bars.”
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Federal regulations apply to Alaska’s vast federal land and waters. But Burton found properties under control of the state of Alaska, and research convinced him that its regulations were more akin to those in Texas – friendly to industry.
Burton ticks them off: It started with no capital. No properties. And within two years, the recession had hit and natural gas prices were headed down.
Buccaneer hunts properties that bigger companies no longer want but which still have unexploited reserves. Early on, it worked in the Gulf of Mexico and onshore coastal areas.
By 2009, stung by the recession and plummeting natural gas prices, Buccaneer needed a new strategy.
But when a consultant suggested Alaska, Burton balked.
“It’s too cold. It’s too remote,” he thought. “Too many polar bears. Too many regulatory bars.”
Federal regulations apply to Alaska’s vast federal land and waters. But Burton found properties under control of the state of Alaska, and research convinced him that its regulations were more akin to those in Texas – friendly to industry.
Add state incentives to spur natural gas drilling in southern Alaska, and it seemed a gamble worth taking.
The past three years haven’t been easy, but Burton insists he is happy with the results.
Buccaneer reported its highest-ever gross production revenue – $5.1 million – for the three-month period that ended in February.
Burton said it was the first company in years to drill for natural gas in Cook Inlet; Apache Corp. and Hilcorp Energy also are there now. Buccaneer also announced a deal with ConocoPhillips earlier this month, giving it access to that company’s deep oil prospects in the inlet.
The man who wanted a challenge has found a seemingly endless string of them.
“Commodity prices are up, and then they’re down,” Burton said, with just a hint of satisfaction at having another problem to deal with. “In our case, we’ve been under-capitalized from the day we started. You’re always dealing with the problems of the day.”
Always working
Burton came to Texas as a teenager — an older sister lived in Dallas and he worked construction there – then worked his way through the University of Texas at Austin, earning an engineering degree.
After a post-college stint at Otis Engineering, he went to work for Sedco, later Sedco-Hamilton, and then traveled the world with other companies and as a consultant.
By 1991, he had signed on with Texaco, where he and another engineer, Steve Wheeler, were charged with preparing the company to move into deeper water.
At the time, Texaco was working in 600 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico but had leases in 3,000 feet.
“I told them, I need $300 million,” Burton said.
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Texaco offered a fraction of that. He and Wheeler devised a study and sold shares to companies willing to bear part of the cost.
Chevron took over the research collaborative known as DeepStar when it acquired Texaco in 2001.
DeepStar has changed as the industry evolved.
“Before, everything was highly proprietary, and stayed that way,” said Jim Chitwood, a technology manager at DeepStar, who has been there from the beginning.
Then most research was done in-house, and people were less willing to share information.
But with so many mergers and other belt-tightening, companies began doing less basic research.
Greg Kusinski, executive director of DeepStar, said it has avoided rivalries among members by emphasizing common needs.
With a budget of almost $8 million contributed by member companies, Kusinski said research now focuses on drilling in more than 10,000 feet of water.
Representatives from member companies discussed the project at the Offshore Technology Conference earlier this month.
They focused on the future – reducing deep-water drilling costs to compete with the shale production boom, for example – but said the industry wouldn’t be where it is without DeepStar’s work on fundamental issues including flow assurance and thermodynamics.
‘Contrarian nature’
Burton walked away from DeepStar in 1996, confident that it was well on its way.
“It’s that contrarian nature,” he said of his decision to leave rather than settling in for a lifetime sinecure. “I like challenges,” he said.
He founded Total Offshore Production Service, the first of a series of start-up and turnaround projects he has launched. Buccaneer is the latest.
Burton is a car collector and an aviation buff, and he looks to the earliest days of flight to explain his business philosophy.
“One of my favorite stories is the Wright brothers,” he said. “They just kept inventing the stuff they needed.”
That sounds familiar to people who know Burton.
“He’s like a lot of engineers,” said Frank Culberson, CEO of Rimkus Consulting Group, an early investor in Buccaneer who now sits on the board. “He likes to be successful. He comes up with good ideas, and he’s willing to take a chance.”
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Risk-taking played out in personal terms last fall, when Burton returned from a business trip. As managing director and CEO of Buccaneer, he has spent much of his time raising money for the company, which is listed on the Australian stock exchange.
A fitness buff, he jumped on his bicycle for a 10-mile ride. He finished but something didn’t feel right.
Same thing the next day. But he felt fine after riding the third day, and Burton figured he was simply out of shape from traveling.
Still, he mentioned the vague symptoms to a friend at church the following weekend and heard about his friend’s experiences with heart disease.
Chastened, Burton called his doctor. Within a few days, he had the diagnosis: severe blockage in several coronary arteries.
But he also had a meeting scheduled in Alaska.
The surgeon told him waiting could be fine. Or not.
He hopped on a plane.
Chitwood, who first met Burton in the 1980s and later went to work at DeepStar, said he isn’t surprised Burton chose the meeting.
“He’s goal-driven,” he said. “Success-oriented.”
And Chitwood said that’s not a bad thing. “He’s got a strong moral compass.”
A strong sense of fun, too, so Chitwood also wasn’t surprised the Christmas party went on as usual.
Burton shrugs.
“I didn’t do all the lifting I normally do,” he said.
But he dismisses any suggestion that the surgery might have caused him to slow down or become more reflective.
“I’ve always been reflective,” he said. “I told everybody, if this was the end, I’ve had a fun time. … It can continue, but it can’t get any better.”
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