Granted, he’s a lawyer. But don’t hold that against John Richels.

The president/CEO of Devon Canada Ltd. has the wholesome good looks of a younger Jack Nicklaus.

He’s tall and supremely poised: a Canadian version of Ivy League male perfection.

Yet once you get past the smooth exterior, Richels comes across as the straightest of straight-shooters.

Dave Lazarowych photo, Business Edge
John Richels holds the only item of memorabilia from OCO ’88 days he has in his office.

He’s also an uncrowned king among multi-taskers, with a star-studded CV. That’s star-studded, not star-spangled.

Canuck to the core, Richels is careful to point out that Devon’s parent company, Devon Energy Corp. of Oklahoma City, allows its wholly owned Canadian subsidiary a substantial degree of autonomy. Richels is fond of recalling a meeting with federal officials who assumed he was just another good old boy from the southwestern U.S.

“I put up my hand and said, ‘For fear of sounding like a well-known beer commercial, I am Canadian,’ ” smiled Richels, proud of Devon’s all-Canadian management team.

(It’s also a group with a demonstrable commitment to Canadian education. Devon Canada recently laid a $250,000 gift on the geology department of Mount Royal College).

Since Devon absorbed Anderson Exploration of Calgary in 2001, Richels has become the Main Man for one of the country’s top five oil and gas producers. But he followed a serpentine path to his executive chair.

He first entered the public eye as senior legal counsel for the Olympic Winter Games Organizing Committee. With OCO ’88, he estimates he signed about 1,700 routine legal documents in a two-year span.

A graduate of University of Windsor law school, Richels had been seconded to OCO ’88 from Bennett Jones, law firm of choice for Calgary’s diamond-cufflink set.

He also managed OCO ’88’s cultural portfolio. And once the Games were history, Richels negotiated licensing deals for OCO’s innovative in-house computer systems with Olympic organizers from Albertville (winter ’92) and Barcelona (summer ’92). OCO’s price: $5.7 million, which contributed to the ’88 Games’ $140-million revenue surplus.

After returning to Bennett Jones as managing partner, Richels was eventually wooed away by Northstar Energy Corp., a longtime client.

He was serving as chief financial officer at Northstar when the company merged with Devon Energy, which morphed into Devon’s Canadian division. Richels has led the company since 2001.

That was the year the conquest-minded corporate parent inhaled Anderson, expanding overnight to 1,400 employees while retaining about 90 per cent of Anderson’s staff.

Which brings us to Richels’ current priority: shopping for major companies to partner in an ambitious and expensive Devon Canada scheme to drill offshore in the Beaufort Sea, home to an estimated 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Among assets Devon acquired from Anderson were four offshore drilling leases, since consolidated into one.

“In the summer of 2001, then again last summer, we undertook an extensive 3D seismic program covering 1,800 kilometres of area in the Beaufort,” he said. “We’re fairly excited about what we see there,” Richels continued. “There are some tremendous-looking opportunities.”

As he spoke, Richels acknowledged that several potential partners have already asked their own experts to study Devon’s seismic data to assess the project’s viability.

Projected costs of drilling in the shallow Beaufort are enormous: an estimated $50 million to $60 million US for each of four or five exploratory wells.

“We’re talking about big money here,” Richels said, raising an eyebrow.

“With a partner you share the risk while gaining the advantage of adding more expertise.

“You get a totally fresh set of eyes examining the data. That never hurts either,” Richels pointed out.

If the project flies – and Richels hopes to have a deal within six months, with drilling targets of winter 2005 or 2006 – it’ll be the first Beaufort Sea exploration in almost two decades.

Admittedly, Devon and future partners will start from Square 1 in the Beaufort. Since Arctic offshore exploration petered out in the early 1980s, the old drilling infrastructure has evaporated.

“Camps, icebreakers, caissons, drilling crews,” Richels ran down the list. “We’ll have to import and rebuild.”

On the bright side, he cited the northern expertise inherited from Anderson as well as Devon Energy Corp.’s track record in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Offshore seismic isn’t unique to the north,” he said. “It’s a deltaic environment and a large body of knowledge has grown up about drilling in those environments.

“Some of the (seismic) structures we see in the Beaufort are similar to those we see in the Gulf.” Take it from the smoothest straight-shooter in town.