Evan Anderson

Technology should amplify hard-earned experience and ingenuity, not replace them. And, in the case of E&P discovery tools, it should be put into the hands of seasoned explorationists who know what to look for.

That’s the concept behind Evan Anderson’s tech startup, Oseberg LLC. Based in Oklahoma City, Oseberg’s software combines three key services in one platform: the most valuable data sets for Oklahoma E&P activity; intuitive data-mining tools; and dynamic visualization tools. “These tools drop jaws every time they’re demonstrated—even the jaw of the guy who invented the industry’s first 3-D GIS application,” says Anderson.

Raised in Norman, Oklahoma, after high school Anderson headed east to play baseball for Duke University. He had no background in the energy industry, so the oil patch was not on his agenda. Instead, he earned a bachelor’s in genetics, law and public policy and was set to attend law school.

Those plans were upended by the accidental oilfield death of his brother-in-law, Chas Harding, the son of Oklahoma independent Charles Harding, co-founder of Harding & Shelton. Anderson deferred law school to return to Oklahoma to support his family. Once there, Charles Harding asked Anderson to stick around and help manage the Anadarko Basin marginal-well assets that Chas had assembled. Thus began Anderson’s “baptism by fire” as an oilman, with Charles Harding meting out what Anderson calls “by far the best education I ever had.”

In learning the E&P business, Anderson noted that“there was a lot of waste.” Second, he observed Harding’s unrelenting focus on detail. “Any time there was a hint of activity near our assets, he wanted to connect hundreds of disparate data points in order to glean insights from the activity.”

The first data-mining algorithm Anderson wrote targeted every well in two counties with flat production, off - line more than two but less than five years, producing at least 5 million cubic feet per month when it went offline, that was not unitized, had no pending pooling, no new leasing, and that hadn’t been plugged. Anderson’s software found every such well in a matter of minutes.

With co-founder Erik Gilje, a Kauffman Fellow, Cornell engineer, and PhD candidate in finance at Boston College (who had begun his career at ExxonMobil before joining Citigroup), Anderson found backing in 2009 from E. Carey Joullian IV, chief executive of Mustang Fuel Corp. After two years of product development, Oseberg launched sales in March 2011, landing 20 clients and more than 100 end-users in under six months. After stepping back to gather and incorporate the anchor clients’ feedback, Oseberg resumed sales this summer and expanded the client base by 25% in that first month back. Oseberg plans to expand the product into other states in 2013. Oil and Gas Investor talked with Anderson recently about the startup’s software, OELite.

Investor Who are your users?

Anderson Explorationists in companies ranging from privately held independents to $20-billion E&Ps.

Investor Who within companies should use the software?

Anderson It varies. I’ve had to learn who the stakeholders are—those responsible for creating value or needing valuable insights over multicounty plays expeditiously. Ultimately, in E&P, the veterans rule. Experience and creativity drive the questions for what and how to query data in order to find actionable insights. So we’re building tools to enable veteran explorationists to leverage technology that’s heretofore been reserved for armchair trans-humanists (those who seek to transform the human condition through technology). There’s been a huge communication gap between those developing software, who often lack core industry experience, and those using it, who don’t even know what’s possible with technology.

Investor Give us some examples of what the software can do.

Anderson One client, a geologist, used it to improve the terms of a Mississippi Lime divestiture by identifying and mapping competitive lease positions. Before OELite, this would have required hiring a lease broker at a cost of $10,000 per week and six weeks of wait time. With OELite, our client produced the results himself in 10 minutes from his desktop.

But, the possibilities are endless. Our clients use it to find unleased, nonproducing acreage; to look at extension-of-play concepts using trends and competitor activity. One geologist mapped every regulatory document showing location exceptions, increased densities, poolings, spacings, and more, involving Woodford shale in the past five years in all of the Cana shale. She generated those results in seconds and had them mapped at the tract level in Petra.

Investor What’s your goal?

Anderson We want to triple our client base and maintain our perfect client retention record this year.

Investor With the evolution of the shale plays, how will opportunities develop?

Anderson Going forward, I think key questions are: Which acreage won’t be drilled? What’s set to expire? Where is the next emerging play? You need to be able to see needles in the haystack and contextualize them across an entire resource play.

Investor Who does the training?

Anderson That would be me, but we are currently hiring. Today I do training, sales, you name it. When we started, I cleaned the bathrooms in our office to pay the rent. It was a good day when we could start paying rent.