October 6, 2005
AUTUMN UPDATE
TEAM AMMONITE ADDITIONS
Ammonite’s team of worldwide energy experts has been strengthened by the addition of four new senior consultants. These include Greg Moroney, joining us as Senior Consultant-Corporate Finance; Dick Bishop, Senior Exploration Advisor and Risk Manager; and Jeff Levine – Senior Consultant for Unconventional Gas Resources; and Steve Schamel, Senior Exploration Advisor.
After working 25 years in energy finance for Citicorp and Deutsche Bank, Greg Moroney brings tremendous experience and expertise in energy corporate finance to Ammonite. He provides his clients with extensive experience in raising capital for acquisitions and project developments from private sources as well as public capital markets, multilateral agencies (IFC, OPIC) and export credit agencies. While working at Deutsche Bank Securities from 1993 to 2002, Greg established and supervised a $250 million mezzanine finance program for the junior oil and gas sector. He also led and supervised teams that raised more than $10 billion of funding for upstream, downstream and pipeline projects throughout North and South America. Several of the transactions were awarded "Deal of the Year" by industry magazines including Project Finance International and Infrastructure Finance. Greg’s first assignment as an Ammonite is as an advisor to a newly formed private E&P company in Kuwait. He is advising the client on arranging the debt and equity components of a $500 million acquisition in the Middle East.
Dick Bishop has joined Ammonite in Houston after a career with ExxonMobil, where he held senior staff positions in international exploration and portfolio risk management. He has “seen the world” both as an explorationist and as a synthesizer of global exploration opportunities. During his career at Exxon, Dr. Bishop developed geological ‘yardsticks’ for play and prospect evaluation, developed economic and geological criteria to compare diverse exploration opportunities for new business development, contributed fundamental scientific concepts of hydrocarbon accumulation and diaper mechanics, and mapped at the reservoir to multi-basin scale. He is a guy who has a grand time doing petroleum geology. As an expert on risk analysis, Dr. Bishop will be helping Ammonite and our clients take a probabilistic approach to economic analysis, and portfolio management. Dick is a past president of both the Houston Geological Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Bishop’s first assignment as an Ammonite involved, together with colleague Mary Van Der Loop, performing the due diligence for a $20 million mezzanine financing for a horizontal development drilling program in the Permian Basin. The report included a statistical analysis of the expected production rates and reserves, and costs for the horizontal completions.
Richard S. Bishop, Ph.D.
Ammonite’s expertise in unconventional gas resources has been greatly strengthened by the addition of Dr. Jeff Levine to Team Ammonite in Richardson, Texas. Jeff has over 30 years of industry experience, and is a well-known expert on coalbed methane through his extensive professional publications and industry in-house training workshops. Over the course of his career, he has worked in most of the coal and shale basins in the United States and Canada, as well as projects overseas, in the United Kingdom, Poland, China, Australia, and Colombia. Recently, Dr. Levine has been doing quite a bit of work in shale gas. He is a past-president and Editor of the Society for Organic Petrography, and the Southwest Section representative on the Advisory Board of the AAPG Division of Energy Minerals.
Jeffrey R. Levine, Ph.D.
Steve Schamel has joined Ammonite as Senior Exploration Advisor in Salt Lake City, Utah. With more than 26 years of senior academic and petroleum industry experience, Dr. Schamel is an expert on domestic and international regional geological studies. He is also an expert on unconventional gas resources, and recently completed an assessment of the shale gas resources of the State of Utah under contract to the Utah Geological Survey. Steve holds degrees from Franklin and Marshall College (A.B.) and Yale University (Ph.D). Ammonite Managing Partner Skip Hobbs has known Steve since the late 1960’s when he was an undergraduate geology major at Yale, and Steve was a grad student Dr. Schamel is the author of numerous papers related to petroleum geology and reservoir characterization, and is a co-author of the recently published Thrustbelts: Structural Architecture, Thermal Regimes, and Petroleum Systems. He is presently the President-elect of the AAPG Rocky Mountain Section, and is a recent Executive Board Chair of the SPE Salt Lake Petroleum Section. In 2003, he organized the SPE-ATW Coalbed Gas Resources of Utah. Steve is a registered Utah Professional Geologist (5366337-2250).
Steven Schamel, Ph.D.
The curriculum vitae of these accomplished experts is now posted on the Curriculum Vitae web page of the Ammonite website.
High oil and gas prices are not only keeping Ammonite busy, but have resulted in Ammonite consultants leaving the consulting world to become full-time employees of energy production and finance companies. Dick Gessinger has joined GE Capital Energy Services in Stamford, Connecticut; Jeff Lund has become Vice President of Exploration for Houston-based Access Exploration Corp.; Bob Dunn has joined Richardson Barr & Co. as Vice President in Houston; and Russell Stands-Over-Bull has rejoined BP Exploration in Houston. Ammonite thanks these gentlemen for their contributions to Ammonite and the firm’s clients. Even though they are no-longer official members of Team Ammonite, we will all remain in close contact and look for future opportunities where there may be synergies between Ammonite and the new employers.
Ammonite is honored to have Susan Eaton, our Canadian Senior Exploration Advisor, selected as a Gerson Lehrman Group Scholar. Susan has been a very active participant in the Gerson Lehrman Group’s Council of Energy Advisors, a service that provides security analysts access to industry experts for consultation. During the past three years, Ms. Eaton has advised the clients of New York-based Gerson Lehrman about the public and private companies involved in the Canadian Oil Sands, and on the emerging coalbed methane play in Western Canada. She has also provided insights for American and British investors into the conventional operations of Canadian E&P companies. To be selected as a GLG scholar, one must rank in the top 20% of client ratings for Gerson Lehrman advisors.