cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Diane Cluff, and Maxine Shirts
"I have always considered myself color blind regarding race. In a thoughtlet about the formation of the Perpetual Education Fund (../0114.html), I wrote about some of our baptisms of blacks in England on my mission, about a black member Roice and I visited in Greenville, Texas, and about the revelation where blacks were given the priesthood. I wrote about a black man I Home Taught when we lived in Dallas who had married a Canadian, and who volunteered to babysit for us one night, and how when Ben saw him Ben started to scream and ran away and hid because he had never seen a black black man before (../9814.html). I have written quite a bit about my work for Mobil Producing Nigeria and subsequent interest in exploring for hydrocarbons there (for example see ../9727.html, ../9909.html, ../9939.html, and ../0130.html). I mentioned in at least one Thoughtlet (../0216.html) that we when we moved into our house on Blue Quail Drive we were about the last white family to move into that subdivision of Missouri City. I did not write that a few months before we moved to 1307 Emerald Green a white police officer's home in the neighborhood was vandalized and racial grafetti and prejudiced epitaphs. It scared us, and was part of the motivation for moving so I did not have to commute so far to Landmark's office on Highway 6 at the mouth of Buffalo Bayou.
This was the first time in Houston I really realized I might not be as racially color blind as I thought. I recall my youth and the `men' in the meat packing plant and their use of the word `nigger.' I really liked our neighbors to the south of our house on Blue Quail Drive. The ones to the north had kids who had got Ben to doing things he wouldn't have normally done (throwing rocks and breaking a car window), and so they were not my favorite folks. I recall being very relieved to move out of that neighborhood. Our move brought to mind some of my trips to Nigeria, and to being held up at the airport by a 6'6" Nigerian with a submachine gun who literally emptied my wallet in order to allow me to take some maps out for Mobil Producing Nigeria. And it brought back memories from my youth listening to relatives and hired hands talk about the black angus and hereford cattle the way Southerner's talked about black and white men.
So, as happens in each of your lives, when I off-handedly mentioned last week about reconnecting with a professional colleague, Jude O. Amaefule, Ph.D., last week, there was a book worth of things I didn't say. I didn't say he was Nigerian, and black as black. I didn't say he is about 5'7" tall. I didn't mention I worked with him when Roger and I were doing the Global Basin Research NetWork, NRMI (Natural Resources Management, Inc.), and laying groundwork for vPatch. I didn't mention how much I like Jude, and how strong this friendship contradicted some of the experiences of my life. I didn't say anything about the kind things he says about me, and about his trusting commitment to work with me because we worked together and because he believes in my technical capabilities. I certainly didn't write about what happened this week, because I had no inkling.
Monday I had continued to pursue remortgaging the house, and was busy setting up meetings, getting confidentiality agreements negotiated, sending new information to Texas A&M, and all of the stuff that occupies my time these days. Some of those phone calls were with Jude O. Amaefule, Ph.D. We agreed that I would go up to his office and meet with him at 11:00 AM on Tuesday. It turns out his office is right next to GeoMark on Telge Road where I borrowed the SpotFire computer many times (../0149.html). He also used to work with Stephen Brown, the founder of GeoMark.
Tuesday morning came, and I was at Jude O. Amaefule, Ph.D.'s office 5 minutes early. As I walked in he called out and had his 3 colleagues from Nigeria come in to meet me. Two of them were big men, like I remembered from my three trips to Nigeria. By the end of our 3 hour meeting I was as comfortable as any meeting with oil and gas folks. Jude has teamed up with Dr. Amos Nur (see ../9908.html, ../0124.html, and ../0213.html) of Stanford University to form Emerald Energy Resources Limited, a Nigerian oil company. Jude's normal activity is as a petrophysical consultant through VRMT International, Inc. (Vision Reservoir Management Technologies International, Inc.). However, he formed Emerald to bid on a couple of blocks in Nigeria. They won both blocks, and had to choose one. They selected OPL-229, and it is one of the most exciting petroleum exploration opportunities I have seen in years. This is the largest coastline lease block in the world at about 500,000 acres. It was held by Nigerian Military folks for decades, and they did not have the technology to drill on it. Jude and his team already have three or four potential fields identified. One is an extension of a producing block. One is a field Shell Oil just discovered, which is inside OPL-229, and which Shell did not recognize because they didn't check their maps right. The third one was drilled by Tenneco and the log was run the same day the Biafra War started in 1969, and they never properly evaluated the log. This last one is between 300 million and a billion barrels of oil. After all the taxes and everything Emerald will receive about $5 profit per barrell of oil produced. For those who don't like math, this one field is worth between US$1.5 billion and US$5 billion to Emerald.
I won't go through all of our discussions on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. However, there are a few tidbits I want to pass on. After Jude O. Amaefule, Ph.D. had gone through his entire technical presentation in detail, I looked him in the eye, put my hand on his knee, and said, `Jude, what do you want this much money for?' He body's reaction showed he was physically shocked with the question. And as I looked into his eyes I could see him saying to himself, can I really trust to share these feelings. After the few seconds it took for him to do this evaluation, there was a peace that came over him. He responded, `I want to establish an educational and agricultural program for West Africa. This is my life's mission. I am not going to buy a yacht.' And as he said the words, I knew why I liked Jude so much, and why I had felt a kindred spirit with him when we worked together on Eugene Island 330 over 10 years ago. This discussion was on Tuesday.
Later that evening, when I was back at the house and downloading the latest developments in Nigeria and building Infinite Grid(SM) maps of the study area, Jude called and we talked more. I told him about Walden 3-D, Inc. and some of my plans and goals. He proceeded to tell me about the village he comes from. It does not have electricity. He has a house there where he stays when he visits. He is the only member of his village who has left and moved to America, become educated, become a U.S. citizen (Jude does retain his Nigerian citizenship), and made money. The Village Father's asked him to help them get an electric generator so they could get it tied into the power grid. He and his family saved up, and within a year were able to buy a generator and get it shipped, through customs, and to his village. They have never been able to come up with the US$100,000. to buy the cables and poles to connect into the grid. Even though he does not believe in charity, and expects others to contribute, his village will be one of the first recepients of success in OPL-229 or some of the other projects he is working on through VRMT.
Given this context, I negotiated an agreement to introduce Emerald to some of the financial folks I have been talking to over the past year, specifically Frontera Resources, MKS Oil & Gas, and CNODC. In exchange Emerald has agreed to pay Dynamic 1.5% of any money invested in Emerald. They are looking to immediately raise at least US$40 million for three exploration wells (US$10 million each), production facilities (US$4 million), and recovery of sunk costs (US$11 million). It will be interesting to see if there is anything behind this. I had Johnny Kopecky and Horace Snyder from MKS out to Jude's offices from 11:00-4:00 on Wednesday. They believe they have an investor, they both have Nigerian experience, and they believe the technical information Jude shared. Jude leaves for Nigeria on Tuesday, the 30th of July, and I expect I will have some kind of status report next Sunday.
Wednesday morning, prior to the meeting with MKS and Emerald, I called Riley Skeen and told him I took the interpretation job with Jude he thought he had. He understood my reasons for taking it, and was in agreement with my logic. Riley might still work on the project when he comes down in a week or so. A little while after this phone call, Reg Spiller of Frontera Resources was at the house. We went over to Dick Coons' house before 9:00 AM, and reviewed two of Dick's large international drilling opportunities. Reg is the guy I met in the hotel in Beijing (see 0025.html) because Matt was wearing a Texans baseball cap in the hotel. I had to leave this meeting early to get to the one with MKS and Emerald, and so I don't know what the status and next steps are. It will probably be a couple of weeks before I find out because Reg is on his way to Turkey.
Jude O. Amaefule, Ph.D. also has contracts with seven Nigerian companies to do technical evaluations on known marginal fields (5-20 MBOE [million barrels of oil equivalent]). I have agreed to become the seismic arm of VRMT and Emerald Energy Resources. So the rest of my week was spent starting work on the Ogedeh Marginal Field, and putting together all of the material I have dug up on Nigerian petroleum exploration. The first of the seven 3-D seismic surveys has been loaded at II&T. I have spent about 15 hours doing the fault interpretation, and hope to have the four key seismic horizons interpreted by Monday night for Ogedeh. Then we start on the next field, and the next one. These are quick interpretations to assist the clients in winning the bids, and the work is being done at a flat rate, which means I am almost working for free (what's new). However, once the bids are won, Jude assures me there will be an opportunity to participate in the success. Hopefully that next step participation will also be better tied down this next week.
The rest of my week was basically taken up doing this work. I feel really bad I did not have the money to send Matt to his Nielson Family Reunion. It is interesting that when I invite you kids to a Nelson Family Reunion I will not do so unless I can provide you all a ticket. Maybe the reason we do not have much cash right now is because I am too willing to spend money coming and going. Oh well! Things will work out.
On Wednesday night I taught a temple preparation class to Jarred Jurinak, Adam Peterson, and Mandy Jones. That was fun, and I think it went pretty good. Andrea fixed some really nice refreshments, and the kids didn't eat very much. Phillip Nelson gave us some Cinemark tickets, and we used some of them on Friday night for Andrea, Matt, and I to go see Harrison Ford's new movie: K-19. The TV advertisements are very missleading. There are no torpedo's launched in the movie. However, it is a very good movie. And it claims to be based on facts, which although I had never heard of them before, make a lot of sense to me. The events the movie presents happened when I was in Junior High School, and they fit the picture I have of what the world was like in those days.
I was working on the fault interpretation yesterday, when Amos Nur called me to talk about Emerald Energy Resources Limited. I walked him to the pages I have put together on the web, which are passworded because of secret data, and so I can't pass them on for your review. As he started to look at them, I was very satisfied to hear under his breath from Stanford, California the words `This is amazing.' What was even more intresting was his choice of how to start the conversation. As I answered the phone he said, `Hi Roice, this is Amos. It has been too long since we talked.' After I reminded him the last time we talked was when he gave the talk on gas hydrates at the University of Houston (../9908.html), he said, `Well, I understand you collided this week with Jude.' I smiled to myself, and wondered what the future holds with working with Jude O. Amaefule, Ph.D."