Offshore History: The Independent That Outsmarted Big Oil
Sun Oil was never going to outbid Shell, Gulf, or Mobil at an offshore lease sale. So in the early 60s a geologist and offshore exploration manager named Jim McCormick built an algorithm, holed up in a hotel room with his team for a few nights, and walked into the sale and got more acreage per dollar than anyone else in the room. Moneyball for offshore leases, thirty years early. It stayed secret. It largely still is.
In this Power Hour we sit down with Jason Theriot, historian and author, who has spent 20 years documenting multigenerational oilfield and marine companies — and now the Sun Oil and Oryx Energy story.
We get into:
The lease sale algorithm that beat the majors' checkbooks in the early 60s.
The Dallas technology center they built during the '80s bust, and what it let them see in the Austin Chalk and at Viosca Knoll Block 826.
How Texaco's arrival in Terrebonne in 1927 turned oyster luggers into the offshore supply fleet pioneered by Cenac Towing and others.