Court Wold joined Cordillera Energy Partners III LLC, a private-equity-backed E&P based in Denver and focused on the Western Anadarko Basin’s Granite Wash play, about three years ago. As a financial analyst, he splits his time between planning and modeling to help the company make educated investment decisions, and developing capital projects.

A member of the Casper, Wyoming-based Wold family, which has longtime businesses in natural resources and cattle ranching, Court grew up surrounded by oil and gas development. Not surprisingly, he values the industry and its people.

He graduated from Colorado College with a degree in business and economics, aiming to work in investment banking. An entrepreneur from an early age, he founded and later sold a moving and storage business for students while in college, and today has several ventures on the side, including an oil and gas royalty business.

After graduation, he joined Headwaters MB and spent several years there working mainly in mergers and acquisitions, selling and raising capital for middle-market companies as a member of the energy and industrials group. Most of the projects he worked on involved the midstream and downstream sectors. While he loved his experience at Headwaters, during his stint there he realized he ultimately wanted to be on the operating, rather than the banking, side of the business. And EnCap Investments-funded Cordillera proved to be a perfect fit.

Oil and Gas Investor talked with Wold recently about recent projects, investment strategies and the entrepreneurial climate at Cordillera.

Investor: You joined Cordillera just as it was building Cordillera III with assets in the Anadarko Basin.

Wold: Yes. We have approximately 240,000 consolidated net acres today with 34 employees and 11 horizontal drilling rigs at work. I spend most of my time in planning and finance, with an emphasis on supporting the senior management team as we build our asset base.

I also spend time on investor relations, because we have a fairly complicated capital structure that requires frequent meetings with debt and equity investors. We take great pride in our internal project planning for A&D, drilling programs and acreage-acquisition programs focused on the Western Anadarko Basin.

One of the reasons my job exists is to provide communication between engineering and finance, so that we integrate capital structure into decision making. Because the reservoir engineering software program, Aries, does not speak with Microsoft Excel, pro forma modeling is oftentimes cumbersome.

Investor: What recent projects have you been most involved with?

Wold: One of my recent mandates with a small team at Cordillera was investing in and merging a midstream asset base, which we recently built and sold. We invested in two midstream gathering assets—in one case we formed a company, and in the other, bought assets. We merged the two, built them up, and then divested those assets in a hot midstream M&A environment. It was an incredible deal, a game-changer for the Cordillera team. Initially we set out to keep the assets, but we are E&P folks, and that’s one of the missions I’ve been a part of—to really focus our asset base. But we are also entrepreneurs. If the way to improve our business or make it more efficient is by investing in gathering to ensure take-away capacity, then we’ll do it.

Investor: Are there risks to that strategy?

Wold: It can be a risk to be 100% focused on one area, and in the past many E&Ps made efforts to be diversified. But as it pertains to resource plays, the more focused you can be, the greater potential value you can build with a given capital plan.

Investor: How would you characterize capital availability currently?

Wold: We’ve found that if you’ve got great management and a good business plan, the obstacle is not raising capital. The market is flush with institutional equity, particularly for teams with successful track records. Typically, it is finding good people to put behind the capital and then focusing on exploitable assets.

Investor: What’s coming up next?

Wold: Things are not slowing down. We just poured our 2012 capital budget and we continue to build our position in the Anadarko to the tune of about 5,000 acres per month, supplemented with bolt-on acquisitions.

Investor: How have you learned the technical aspects of oil and gas?

Wold: I spend about half of my time with geologists and engineers and landmen in small teams looking at projects, which is a great opportunity. I’m surrounded by incredible senior people here. And George (Solich, president and chief executive of Cordillera) believes in building a team of young people and giving them a lot of responsibility. I don’t think there are too many situations where the next generation has as much responsibility and exposure to day-to-day value creation.

Investor: What’s your long-term goal?

Wold: To continue to help build a team of really competitive, smart oil and gas professionals and start companies and build value for investors. We do have plans for additional iterations of Cordillera, and I look forward to being a part of those.