Jim Musselman
Editor's note: This profile is part of Hart Energy's 50th anniversary Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers of the past 50 years and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
Jim Musselman has a knack for spotting opportunity. More often than not, it has paid off.
He got his first taste of the oil and gas industry as a lawyer, handling his brother Johnny’s legal work and helping put together finance deals.
“I was working by the hour and I was making a lot of people a lot of money,” he recalled. “I was getting paid by the hour, and I decided I needed to be in the business.”
Jim and Johnny Musselman teamed up with Jon Rex Jones and brother A.V. Jones to start the oil gathering company JM Petroleum.
“We ran that for 10 years, and we ended up having 100,000 barrels a day that we were gathering,” he said.
Jon Rex Jones, now president of Jones Management, said the Musselman brothers were good partners for the business that bought and sold crude.
“With Jim leading the way, it grew to 101 trucks hauling oil and selling that oil in Texas,” he said. “He was smart and willing to do the work, to adapt new ideas on how to market crude oils.”
Along the way, Musselman recommended innovations that today seem rudimentary but were cutting edge at the time, such as using instruments to gauge oil tank levels before and after removing oil they had purchased to scientifically prove the volume removed, and synching that information with the head office in Dallas, rather than calculating estimates and sending those numbers by mail.
“That was just one of the innovative ideas that Jim was able to foster for us,” Jones said. “He’s been an entrepreneur in thought and action ever since he got involved with us in JM Petroleum.”
The partners ultimately sold JM Petroleum to Wesray Capital Group in the ’80s, and Musselman decided to try drilling.
“It was a terrible business. I learned that early on. You don’t want to be in the drilling business unless you’ve got really big pockets,” he said.
He pivoted and joined Triton Energy, where he was involved with the company’s reorganization that replaced long-time president William Lee and Tom Finck. Musselman became CEO.
“We went into West Africa, to Equatorial Guinea, and made some good discoveries there. Not as big as Jubilee, but we made some really nice discoveries,” including the Ceiba find offshore Equatorial Guinea, he said.
In 2001, Amerada Hess, which later became Hess, bought Triton and when non-competes expired, Musselman and four colleagues founded Kosmos Energy, which sought oil offshore Ghana.
But securing a rig to drill the prospect was difficult, he said. Early in the exploration phase, he overheard some of the rig hands complaining about being in Ghana.
“They just said, ‘let’s get this dry hole out of the way and move on.’ I still chuckle about that all the time,” Musselman said.
The Jubilee Field, discovered in 2007 and onstream since 2010, has about 3 Bbbl of proven reserves.
“Jubilee has got to be one of the most exciting things that we did because that really did open up that whole Ghana (play). That was a pretty good step out, and that was pretty risky,” he said.
After leaving Kosmos in 2010, he started Caelus Energy, which sought another Jubilee-sized field, this time on Alaska’s North Slope.
“We made a billion-barrel discovery up on the north slope of Alaska, but it is probably 50 miles from any infrastructure,” he said.
The company expected to be able to build the needed infrastructure to transport the oil, but faced an unfavorable regulatory environment and low oil prices, he said.
“We ended up selling that asset to Conoco, who were there, and they had longer staying power than we did. And so, that was a disappointment. We loved Alaska,” Musselman said.
He said he’s been blessed to have a varied career, which also involved helping lead an investor coalition to design, construct and operate the Lone Star Park horse racetrack facility that opened in Grand Prairie, Texas, in 1997. But the oil industry has always brought him the biggest thrill.
“I enjoy the thrill of the hunt and the opportunity to work with really good, smart people,” Musselman said.
—Jennifer Pallanich, Senior Editor, Technology