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By Katherine Scott, editorial coordinator

At the age of four, Glenda Wylie, now director of global technical marketing for Halliburton, was given three acres of land by her family on their farm in Missouri to do with as she pleased. “I got to decide how to fertilize, what seed to plant and how to make it profitable,” she said. “This was my parents’ way of introducing me to math and science and the financial part of making a business at a very young age.” From farming then to oil and gas today, what hasn’t changed is that Ms Wylie continues to foster an independent, hardworking spirit with continuous improvement and innovation.

Ms Wylie is a self-proclaimed “square peg in a round hole.” Growing up in Missouri, she wasn’t familiar with the oil and gas industry, but she recalls falling in love with science and the outdoors early on. Ms Wylie graduated high school near the top of her class and recognized that a career in science awaited her beyond the farm. “The only thing my town knew was that diesel was poured into the tractors to make them go,” she said. “I got into the oil and gas industry through my own research and persistence.”

Ms Wylie earned a degree in chemistry from Kentucky’s Murray State University in 1975 and soon went to work in a Houston laboratory for ARCO. Almost instantly, however, she realized she didn’t want to spend her career confined to a lab with limited ability to make decisions.

Determined to pursue a job that would give her greater opportunities in decision-making, Ms Wylie earned her second degree in 1979 – in chemical engineering from Texas A&M. Her hard work paid off, and a new position within ARCO sent her to Alaska this time around. “Whenever I hit Alaska, that was like a gold mine for me. There were a couple of mentors up there that took me through every phase of the oil and gas business very quickly and I will always be deeply indebted to them,” she said.

While up north, Ms Wylie was involved with more than 8 exploration, initial field startups, and secondary recovery projects of various varieties that included unconsolidated sandstone, carbonate, heavy oil, offshore hard rock, and multilayered sandstone reservoirs. . She also managed the US$150 million West Sak pilot project from start to finish. During her time in Alaska, Ms Wylie additionally earned a Master’s degree in engineering management from the University of Alaska in 1992.

In 1995, Ms Wylie shifted gears when she went to work for Halliburton as a production engineer, a position well supported by her years spent on the operator side of the business. “I had operator experience and understood the challenges that operators have to deal with. When I came to the service company, it was to help solve those operator challenges in a more efficient way.”

On her first day at Halliburton, Ms Wylie received a plane ticket to Canada to work on the Hibernia project in offshore Newfoundland. “Offshore Newfoundland had been dormant for a while.  I was the first upstream Halliburton person to join the Hibernia team,” she said. “We drilled and started up the initial four wells. Halliburton gave me a job where I felt like I could significantly contribute.”

As Halliburton’s director of global technical marketing since 2007, Ms Wylie collaborates with customers worldwide across the company’s spectrum of technologies to pinpoint effective and efficient solutions.  “I collaborate with customers on their specific challenges in order to solve them. Sometimes this entails taking customers to the field operations to see the rigs or hydraulic fracturing units,” she said. Halliburton developed the position specifically for Ms Wylie to deliver high value solutions  across unconventional, deepwater, mature and technically challenged global basins.

For over a decade, Ms Wylie has also been a member of the Drilling Engineering Association (DEA) advisory board. “The DEA is the only organization in the industry by which oil companies, new start-up companies, universities, government and service companies can work together in joint industry projects,” she said. The advisory board presents ideas to the industry for potential collaboration and development. “It is an excellent place to see if the new technology ideas fulfill a challenge multiple operators might have or if it’s a technology that fits into a small niche,” she said.

As someone with extensive experience in both offshore and onshore projects and a job that looks at technology regardless of where it might have originated, Ms Wylie believes that the land and offshore sectors of the industry need to work better at supporting one another. “Some of the technologies that are being used offshore need to be onshore, and some of the new unconventional technology that we’re using now needs to go offshore,” she said. “The reservoirs are changing offshore where before it was a very unconsolidated sand formation. They’re becoming harder as we go deeper.” Ms Wylie added that  unconventional land based operations in some areas need seawater based technology to support hydraulic fracturing operations. “This technology has been used in deepwater for many years,” she said. “The industry should understand that the technologies are available, but it needs to be communicated and packaged differently.”

Further, both offshore and onshore need to dramatically improve the pace of data analyses, Ms Wylie said  “While we are sometimes excellent at collecting the data, sometimes the data analyses do not get passed through the entire well construction and completion process where it can make significant contribution to the production of the well or improving the drilling operations,” she said. “Integration and automation across the basin life cycle will address this shortfall, but it will require every aspect of the industry to work on this  individually and collaboratively to insure the highest net value is delivered out of the basin.”

Coming full circle, Ms Wylie once more lives on over 50 acres of land, this time in Hempstead, Texas, with a daily 70-mile commute to work in Houston. She approaches life, both in the work environment and at home, in the same way. “I am driven by improving profitability and sustainability,” she said, “whether that’s developing a new area for recovering hydrocarbons, improving recovery of an older field, no matter where it might be in the world, or in my personal life of raising cattle and growing rice.”

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Brady Long holds a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a political science degree from Brigham Young University.

Listening to Brady Long’s story of how he found himself working first at Pride International and now at Ensco, you realize that he’s telling you he feels more at home working among drillers than among lawyers. Considering his law degree background, it seems slightly ironic.

From Mr Long’s point of view, however, his transition from a law firm into the energy industry in 2004 couldn’t have been more natural. “Some of the finest people I’ve ever met are in this industry. There’s something special about people in the drilling industry, no question about it,” he said. “I feel like it’s a natural fit for me.”

His role as vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary for Ensco – which he assumed after the company completed its acquisition of Pride on 31 May – also allows Mr Long to get into the everyday action of the business, versus simply facilitating from the sidelines.

“Working for a law firm, the biggest challenge was truly understanding your client’s operations. … You don’t have the same visibility to how the client functions. I was always curious about that and thought this would be much more interesting on the other side, where I’m working shoulder to shoulder with the client, as the valued counselor.”

In 2004, after spending five years with Bracewell & Patterson (now Bracewell & Giuliani), Mr Long joined BJ Services for about a year, then decided to accept an offer from Pride as assistant general counsel.

He recalls being drawn to the “vibrant feel” of the company, at the time just starting to come off of some tough times from prior years. “It was obviously a dynamic company that was positioned for vast improvements in its governance and management practices, as well as its financial position,” Mr Long said. “I was fortunate enough to witness the transformation of the company.”

That turnaround, including the sale of the land rig fleet, spin-off of the mat-supported jackups, various other divestitures and acquisitions, plus newbuild construction projects, culminated in the company’s acquisition by Ensco, announced in early 2011. That transaction was completed at the end of May, capping months of hectic merger-related activities for Mr Long and his legal team.

Now, he hopes to spend the coming year growing into the new organization and determining the best way to serve the company and its people. He doesn’t expect significant changes in his day-to-day responsibilities, however: advising the management team on drilling contracts, navigating through disputes, sorting through regulatory issues, advising the board on executive compensation and corporate governance, and managing high-stakes litigation, for example.

In 2007, challenges associated with the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) had emerged within the drilling industry that appeared to elevate everyone’s compliance sensitivities. Am I in compliance? If not, how do I get there? were questions that everyone was asking.

“I was on vacation when it occurred to me that IADC had committees for a lot of significant topics like HSE, contracts and tax, but I wondered why it doesn’t have a committee for ethics and corporate compliance. All the factors were there. We had a common interest, and we certainly had an incentive. … Although we all have different management practices and styles, we were dealing with the same problems, and we all wanted to do the right thing,” Mr Long said. “We needed to share our resources in a more effective way so we could learn from each other and thus improve our compliance records.”

The idea for such a committee took hold quickly, and the IADC Ethics and Corporate Compliance Committee was established in 2007. “We collectively agreed it was time. I was very pleased to see that IADC embraced it, and a number of members embraced it very quickly as well. They immersed themselves in the antibribery community, and we’ve had very strong participation ever since our inaugural meeting in September 2007.”

As chairman of the committee since its inception, Mr Long said he’s also pleased to see the drilling industry enhancing its reputation on this front and believes it will only continue to do so.

“The FCPA is not a static thing; it’s dynamic. There are new rules and settlements and enforcement actions you have to stay on top of, so it’s a never-ending pursuit,” he said. “I think most chief compliance officers in our industry are pleased with where we are today, but we recognize we need to continue to push very hard to maintain our momentum.”

Founded in 1969, the Offshore Technology Conference is the world’s foremost event for the development of offshore resources in the fields of drilling, exploration, production, and environmental protection. OTC is held annually at Reliant Center in Houston.

Each year, OTC attracts more than 60,000 attendees and 2,000 exhibiting companies representing more than 110 countries.

OTC is sponsored by 12 industry organizations and societies, who work cooperatively to develop the technical program. OTC also has endorsing and supporting organizations.

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OTC .10 Technical Program

The OTC .10 technical program offers a well-balanced, three-prong focus on technical, business, and regulatory issues in the oil and gas industry. It emphasizes a wider spectrum of energy sources and global reach.

Primary Focus on Oil and Gas Developments and Technology

OTC offers case studies and updates on the latest deepwater projects from majors, independents, national oil companies, and service companies.

It also includes a panel discussion on surface BOPs and burst pressure requirements in pipeline and riser design as well as papers on updated API recommended practices.

Sessions focus on

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Business Risks

The business environment is changing and presenting new challenges.

Senior executives will discuss how best to manage social and environmental risks in international projects; how to sustain technological innovation in periods of volatile earnings; and how oilfield service companies can manage through current tough times.

Oil companies will also offer their perspective on the upstream business in Brazil.

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OTC .10 policy sessions bring diverse and balanced opinions—without advocating a particular political opinion.

Discussion includes the costs to implement climate change policies; whether climate change and humans are at fault for more and stronger hurricanes; the DOE carbon capture and sequestration program; and the role of energy on jobs and the economy.

Expanding the Energy Spectrum

OTC now presents alternative energy sources such as offshore wind energy, ocean wave energy, ocean thermal energy conversion, and gas hydrates. 

Breakfast presentations will cover ocean renewables and thermal energy. A series of sessions discuss new developments in gas hydrates—from resource evaluation to flow testing.

Global Reach

The program covers oil and gas case studies from the deepwater “golden triangle” region of the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, and Africa. Other focus areas are the Caspian Sea, Arabian Gulf, and Atlantic Canada, as well as offshore construction in China.

OTC’s invited organization, the American International Petroleum Negotiators (AIPN), will have a panel session on “Sustaining Business in Global Volatility.”

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