Back when cagey Jack Gallagher of Dome Petroleum was plotting ways to extract oil and gas from the Beaufort Sea, he had the wit to hire a well-seasoned offshore expert named Tip Moroney.

“Tip’s only function was to answer questions from our junior engineers. It seemed like one of the better investments Jack made in the early days,” drawled Ed Fercho, himself a longtime Arctic hand, and ex-operations VP of CANMAR, Dome’s drilling subsidiary.

A long, lanky, Waylon Jennings lookalike, Fercho now finds himself cast in the mentoring role.

With natural gas prices in orbit, and companies such as Petro-Canada, Shell Canada, and Alberta Energy Co. Ltd. hightailing it to the Mackenzie Delta, years of scuffling in the Canadian Arctic are paying off for super-senior vets such as Fercho, and his buddy Vic Mroszczak, a former Dome exploration manager.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Arctic experts Vic Mroszcak, left, and Ed Fercho share a laugh.

“Guys like Ed and I are the last of the Mohicans,” said Mroszczak, who’s been retained as senior geologist by Hunt Oil Co. of Canada, because of his Arctic expertise.

Meanwhile, Fercho, who accepted a buyout package from BP Amoco in the early 1990s, is now part of a six-partner firm of veteran consultants, called Canadian Petroleum Engineering Inc.

AEC has sought out Fercho’s expertise, and the partners are acting as project managers for a gas hydrate research development project, on behalf of Japex Canada Ltd., on Richards Island in the Delta.

Thirty years after Fercho and Mroszczak first felt slashing Arctic zephyrs gnawing on their cheekbones, seismic crews are again scouring the tundra, applying their up-to-the-second technologies to the quest for subsurface gas deposits.

This summer, the Beaufort Sea will again be alive with seismic researchers, 13 years after Dome, demoralized and debt-plagued, slid down BP Amoco’s gullet, disappearing forever.

And now, the brightest of the new kids, with their high-end geophysical gizmos and sound-recording gear, are seeking out those who helped make it happen in the first place.

“We don’t tell them so much what to do, but what NOT to do,” Fercho said with a sly smile.

“We try to make sure they don’t go out and re-invent the wheel.”

Particularly since the job was done so well the first time.

Geologist Mroszczak remembers he was fresh out of McGill, when his parents were jolted to see his photo on the front page of the Montreal Star, circa 1964.

Then with Imperial Oil, “a much younger Vic” was pictured prowling the tundra, doing early surface work in the Canadian Arctic, a job which occupied him each summer through 1972.

“The excitement was incredible,” said Mroszczak, who later joined Gallagher’s team at Dome. “Everything was new. This was different from anything happening in Canada,” or, most of the old hands agree, the rest of the world.

While Mroszczak was mooching through soil samples, Fercho was dodging ice floes on the high seas, first as drilling manager on the Explorer II, back when “each manager was god on the drill ship — which irritated the captains to some extent,” Fercho chuckled.

In the true frontier spirit, it was a time of can-do solutions, in the face of enormously complex problems.

“What we wound up doing in the Dome-CANMAR era was to take conditions considered impossible to explore, and develop technology and equipment to explore with reasonable ease,” Fercho said matter-of-factly.

Beaufort crews stared down problems such as drilling through permafrost, wellhole erosion, and deciding which type of fixed structure could best withstand the 24-hour assault of an ever-shifting ice pack.

Fercho’s Japanese clients are now reaping the rewards of CANMAR’s innovative treatment of gas hydrate, frozen deposits of natural gas.

“If you drill through this gas with warm mud, it releases the gas. Release a cubic foot of (frozen) gas, it’ll multiply by 100-plus times, and you’ve got well-control problems,” Fercho explained.

CANMAR technicians developed tools to cool the drilling mud. End of problem. Then the 1974-’77 Berger Commission urged a 10-year moratorium on oil and gas activity. Combined with faltering markets and the feds’ removal of tax breaks for frontier exploration, that spoiled the northern party.

Dome ran up $5 billion in debts, and died. However, CANMAR, its solvent subsidiary, carried on, working in Alaskan waters.

“It had been a very gung-ho, let’s-go-do-it atmosphere,” said Mroszczak, who subsequently took his expertise to Eastern Europe, on behalf of BP Amoco.

“But when that spirit’s built up like that, it’s easily crushed,” he said, still tasting the disappointment.

But the spirit is resurrected, and some of the pioneers are getting in on it. Tip Moroney would surely approve.