Petro Canada, the garage sale continues?

I suspect a garage sale attitude may be on management's mind. Reviewing the 2005 Annual Report and first quarter of 2006, Petro Canada appears to me to have more then just an earnings problem, but also a severe cash problem. If they are selling an asset it would be for the cash and to boost the second quarters earnings.

The seriousness of the situation leads me to think that last years sale of Syria may have been "forced" to earn enough cash and earnings to continue the pretence. Selling the Syrian property would have otherwise never happened. Think of Skilling and Lay selling to make the profits as opposed to shuffling.

So lets keep our eyes and ears open for any large property sales out by our favorite company.

I can't seem to find any reason why the company is hemorrhaging so much cash. In the last 4 reported quarters they have increased their debt by $2,091 million. Most of this coming from long term debt to finance capital expenditures. Additional sources of cash have been through the discounting of accounts receivables, to the tune of $480 million.

Hold it, I think I might see where some of the money is going. There's a normal course issuer bid. In the last 4 quarters Petro Canada management have spent over $1 billion in share buy backs. Now to be fair I don't like share buy backs, particularly when the company has to go into debt to do them. It's dumb, very dumb. Instead of buy backs, companies should think special dividends if you have the money.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Petro-Canada, Financial's

Petro Canada's first quartile operations.

As I read the 2005 Petro Canada annual report I find that management holds itself to the rather high standard of "First Quartile Operations". It's good to see they strive to be amongst the best in the business.

But wait! What's this footnote?

"Reference to first quartile operations in this report do not refer to industry wide benchmarks or externally known measures. The company has a variety of internal metrics which define and track first quartile operational performance."

That's like having your kids grade themselves in school! Dad I got straight A's. Again.

Lets revisit some of the fine work that Petro Canada does do.

• Does not have their reserve estimates reviewed by independent engineers. This task is left to the vice president in charge of production, or whom ever has the highest number of stock options.
• Doesn't use outside metrics of performance evaluation.
• Uses hokey calculations such as "195% reserve replacement" to obfuscate the truth.
• Can't buy a small company because they won't give it away.
• Can't make money at $70 / bbl.
• Can't make money on confiscated assets. (Those that were nationalized and given to Petro Canada)
  
• Management have endowed themselves with over $350 million "in the money" stock options.

I have to ask what is this company worth? This is a festering sore on the Canadian oil and gas industry. It should be dealt with quickly.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Petro-Canada, Bureaucracy

A coincidence? I think not...

Today's Calgary Herald reports two items of interest. First T. Boone Pickens has now stated that the energy system is at 100% capacity and there is no more. Essentially declaring for the Peak Oil theorists that this day is the highest attainable production volume, ever. I fundamentally believe he is right. 85 million barrels a day is lot of production. If you add the natural gas equivalent, its over 120 million barrels a day. (That's over 5 billion gallons per day, or, almost one gallon for each person on earth).

The second point the Herald notes is the vast number of career openings for engineers and geologists. Seems like the bureaucracy needs more of these people to push the paper around.

The point of course is that these are saying the same thing. The productive capacity of the oil and gas industry is dependent on the human resources available. The number of engineers and geologists is rather limited in the whole scheme of things. What is needed is a new form of organization that will enable the geologists and engineers to work faster, and more effectively.

As it stand today, just as T. Boone Pickens has called the Peak, I can assure my readers that the bureaucracy is on the verge of choking on the paper, and quite frankly, never been happier.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Peak Oil, Innovation, Bureaucracy

Military command, part III

I want to follow up quickly on my military command entry and concepts. The points that I want to establish today are:

• Allies = Other producers, or members of the joint operating committee, or service based organizations.
• Each army can be parsed into further classifications such as Navy, Marine, Army and Air Force.
• Each participant in the joint operating committee organizations may have several roles, several tasks and several "superiors" and / or underlings reporting to them from various organizations.

First up are allies. Many military commands expand beyond the scope of the current army. In WWII the entire allied forces were under the command of General Eisenhower. The English and Canadian militaries, although separate from the Americans, were engaged in similar exercises and were coordinated as one. This is the type of application that I think is needed to solve the current and prospective energy issues. Working for a company you may be seconded to work for several different joint operating committees that your company has an interest in. This military analogy is only a more formal method of recognizing the loosely coupled nature of the missions, tasks, physical resources, and personnel.

Second separate tasks or specialty roles are segregated between certain military disciplines. In this analogy the Navy, Airforce, Marines and Army are replaced by the Geological, Engineering, Administrative and Field disciplines. As with the individual disciplines the military chain of command remains in tact through the various disciplines. As an Army Captain would have superior rank to a Navy Private, the Senior Geologist would also have a recognized authority and superior rank over a junior Engineer.

Each worker within the oil and gas industry is therefore tasked in many different situations with different rank and roles. The producer that is his / her employer will have the opportunity and latitude to second each individual to work in any capacity and area that they are authorized in. This dynamic component being actively managed through the Genesys system identity management. Each worker in turn may have several different producers, which is almost a given, to be assigned tasks from.

Lastly I want to raise a point that dovetails nicely with what Susan Hockfield, MIT President and Professor of Neuroscience has stated. Noting that the situation in energy was in a "Perfect Storm" and I quote.

"President Susan Hockfield unveils MIT's grand-scale initiative to confront the urgent challenge of our time: clean, affordable energy to power the world. In much the same way that MIT played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, she calls for the Institute to muster its formidable forces to speed a transformation of the global energy landscape."

Note her tie in to the level of effort equivalent to MIT's in WWII. I share the concern and strongly recommend everyone to watch the MIT video of Professor Hockfield to understand better our concerns.

The analogy to the military has unfortunate connotations. However, it is by far the best manner of layering a component of command and control over the joint operating committee. The systems that we develop here are best suited for these interactions. So much of what we discussed here would be transparent and seamless to the user.

Nonetheless I think it is generally agreed that the hierarchy that is now in full command and control is not the organizational structure that will marshal a solution to energies "perfect storm." After all they don't even believe there is a problem.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Military Command, Innovation, Energy

Dr. Giovanni Dosi, Sources Part IV, F & G

Part F. Determinants and Patterns of Investment in Innovation: Toward a Sectoral Taxonomy.

Up until this point Dosi has laid some groundwork for future classification of business types of which he describes in four sectors:

• Supplier dominated sectors: "innovations are mainly process innovations, embodied in capital equipment and intermediate inputs and originated by firms whose principal activity is outside these sectors proper." (Agriculture, Printing, etc.) p.1148
  
• Specialized suppliers: "Innovative activities relate primarily to product innovations that enter most other sectors as capital inputs." (Mechanical and instrument engineering.) p. 1149
  
• Scale sensitive Sectors: "Innovation relate to both processes and products and production activities generally involve mastering complex systems." (Transport equip, electronic durables, food, glass and cement.) p. 1149
  
• Science based sectors: "Innovation is directly linked to new technological paradigms made possible by scientific advances: technological opportunity is very high, innovative activities are formalized in R & D labs." (Chemical industries, drug companies, bio-engineering.) p.1149
  

In my thesis I suggested that oil and gas industry was moving from the Supplier Dominated Sectors to the Science Base Sectors. That this change is due to the demands of finding and producing oil and gas in remote areas with higher risks and smaller reserves. An era where the engineering and geological effort is substantially higher then what had been experienced before. Dosi suggests this leads to new and better methods. Methods that require the capability of the firm to learn and keep up with the changes in the underlying sciences and other innovative producers.

I believe it is fairly evident in this era of high commodity prices that their will be a new basis of leadership in oil and gas. One where the science of geology and applied science of engineering dominate the organizational decision making and competitive capability. Moving from one sector to another may or may not have happened in other industries before. One thing for certain is, that it won't be easy.

Technorati Tags: Dosi, Science, Innovation, Energy

Another call to action?

After almost a week off I'm back and fully charged.

The call to action that I am referring to here to is an article in last Friday's Calgary Herald. The article states that the junior oil and gas producers and royalty trusts are having difficulty making money. Peter Knapp of Iradesso Communications states "Everybody thought it was going to be easy to make a lot of money and that just isn't the case". With natural gas prices down almost 50%, they are also finding their costs are high. They also clearly and unanimously feel that the gas price will rise after June.

So how is this a call to action? I have suggested a solution to this problem is to innovate and move with the science. Not that this hasn't or isn't being done, it is just that we have hit a critical period in which the sciences are changing quickly. The capital being generated from higher prices is a reallocation of the resources to fuel innovation. A profitable firm in the future will be able to collaborate with a greater population of all resources to determine the most effective ways and means of exploration and production.

This is the role and responsibility of the joint operating committee. And for the "business" end of the oil and gas business to continue to ignore the joint operating committee in its organizational structure and systems, the industry I suggest, will continue to fail in making money. A further failure will occur in that the industry will be unable to deliver the appropriate amount of oil and gas to the market.

By my count that's 10 calls to action.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Call-to-action, Innovation, Energy

Military command, part II, why project management isn't the solution.

Project management fares poorly in comparison to the global scope of accomplishment of military command and control. In "Organization, the key" I noted the use of military command and control type structures as the replacement to the bureaucratic hierarchy. This military analogy and metaphor needs to be implemented within oil and gas in order to facilitate a method and a means of getting things accomplished. Since, as we have discussed, software defines the organizational constructs, this command styled implementation is an element of this Genesys systems, and specifically the technology will be built to superimpose the military command and control style organizational structure.

The implementation here is not dissimilar to the military metaphor, with "orders" being simply replaced in the "work order" system of Genesys. All tasks, equipment, human and other resources are managed through the system to provide a means for things to be accomplished.

This system will also be responsible to maintain the encryption, authentication and authority of each transaction. Since we are talking about the commercial elements of an oil and gas concern then "role" and "rank" also need to be implemented to provide a seamless manner that work should be accomplished in. I will write about role and rank in this series many times.

Project management is limited in its application as a means of operating a going concern. It therefore fundamentally violates its basic premise, that is it's temporary. Other problems in attempting to retrofit a project management structure to manage oil and gas assets include, diversity, depth and scope of communications.

Project Management teams may not have the diversity of resources necessary to effectively manage the assets. Consider for a moment how many people it takes to drill a well. From the point of view that if you include all the individuals who would be paid for their skills in drilling that well. I am talking about the billing clerk at the water trucking company to the chairman of the joint operating committee. Project management can not facilitate the scope and diversity of the 100's and possibly thousands of people that are involved in getting something done.

Another area where Project management falls apart is in its depth of resources. In oil and gas it is generally considered, as it is with anything complex, that the quality of the well drilled will be as good as the least experienced individual on the platform. Mistakes happen and the reduction of mistakes takes on a greater role then risk management. The active participation in activities can also broaden the scope of the problem solving capability. It is my fundamental belief that the more eyeballs that review the situation the better. The virtual environment can marshal more resources in this fashion then the physical world can.

The last deficiency of project management that I will point out today is that it is generally limited to human resources. We have discussed on this blog the types of communication being asynchronous and synchronous. We have also discussed the four methods of those communications being person to person, person to process, process to person and process to process. We can not limit the scope of the organizational construct of the joint operating committee to just human resources. The physical assets and capabilities of vendors, suppliers, or anyone and anything involved in oil and gas must be managed with the utmost efficiency. If we preclude certain resources at this point then we preclude the holistic solution this system will be. And if we preclude the methods and modes of communication (asynchronous vs. synchronous and Person to person etc.) then we will certainly have limited the potential for this new way of working.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Military Command

Top 10 management excuses from Petro Canada.

Since I have predicted that the second quarter of 2006 will not be a very good quarter. I thought I'd come up with some excuses for the management of Petro Canada to use for their poor performance.

• Number 10, My Porsche was delivered this past quarter.
• Number 9, It really is just about us.
• Number 8, Production was down, it's the oil business.
• Number 7, You won't believe the costs to do business these days.
• Number 6, Just be thankful oil isn't trading at $18.
• Number 5, Precisely, what do you expect?
• Number 4, Selling Syria may have been a mistake, the clerk responsible has been fired.
• Number 3, Employee costs were so high!
• Number 2, We were trying very hard to buy Canada Southern Petroleum so we could become an explorer.
• and the Number 1 reason we lost money this quarter,
  
• We got ours, too bad about yours.

Technorati Tags: Accountability, Bureaucracy, Leadership, Petro-Canada

A bad attitude towards locals.

Reading yesterday's Calgary Herald I see a trend that continues to shape the oil and gas industry in Canada, in a negative way. I mentioned in an earlier post the response I received regarding the research that was the basis of this blog's copyright. How I was promptly shown the street, informed that the industry only conducted research with large firms like Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) and that CERA was ultimately hired to conduct the research based on my intellectual property. Thankfully I was able to publish the results of my research before Cambridge, and as a result, earned the full rights to the copyright and associated intellectual property.

Is it a lack of confidence or disbelief in our own capabilities that causes an industry to look outside for its own research and decision making. What I found disturbing is that it is not just the industry but also the Alberta Government. They hired a Texas based firm to review the prospects of building a super refinery in the province for around $10 billion. The results of the Texas based consulting firm was that Alberta did not have the capability to undertake such a task.

I find this rather insulting. That we have the industry "leadership" deferring to our competitors to determine the activities in this province is bad enough. To have the Alberta Government doing the same is regrettable. So forget about courage and leadership, just defer the decision to those that may have vested interests in building their own super refineries, and have them make the decision for you. At least you will have covered you ass.

This is the reason that this project is now a global operation. Little if anything can be expected from these "local business leaders". Which makes this whole situation kind of ironic, instead of working in developing things together, lets just defer to strangers why we shouldn't do anything.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Petro-Canada, Innovation, Energy

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Petro Canada that is. Seems they have attracted some other bidders in their hostile offer for Canada Southern Petroleum Ltd. Greg Noval of Canadian Superior Energy is making a competing bid and it will be interesting to see if Petro Canada has the gumption to make a revised offer.

Recall that this process was so that Petro Canada was able to call themselves an explorer, however, I am afraid they may soon be better known for the company they keep.

Technorati Tags: Genesys, Petro-Canada, Innovation, Energy