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Vol. 232 No. 6 |
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| NELL LUKOSAVICH, SENIOR EDITOR |
Marvin Gearhart:
Oil field of dreams
If there’s one person who knows the oilfield business inside and out, it’s Marvin Gearhart, co-founder of Gearhart-Owen Industries (1955) and founder of Rock Bit International (1989) and Gearhart Companies (2005). From his days making $250 a month as a field engineer to selling a company he started in a garage for $500 million, Gearhart has been reinventing the oil field for over six decades.
Gearhart’s passion for the oil business began when, as a child, he helped his dad collect the one or two barrels of oil from each of the stripper wells on his family’s Neosho County, Kansas, farm. “My dad was a ‘pumper’ and I often watched him changing the rod lines from one well to another,” Gearhart said.
He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Kansas State University. “When I went off to college, I wanted to learn more about this industry and how it operated where wells flowed oil to the surface without being pumped,” Gearhart said. “Such wells were the dream of anyone wanting to get into the oil business.”
After college, Gearhart accepted a position as a field engineer with Welex Jet Services, designing and building specialty shaped charged perforating guns, similar to those used in anti-tank warfare, for $250 a month. While at Welex, Gearhart met part-time student Harrold Owen, who also worked in shaped charge development.
A few years later, while working for Dresser Industries in Whittier, California, Gearhart ran into his Welex buddy Owen at a conference. The two quickly realized that they had a unique knowledge base. The next year, 1955, Gearhart and Owen met Marion Stekoll, an oil operator who had been experimenting with some new perforating techniques involving the use of nitrogen in the fluid to get better flowback.
In Owen’s garage in Fort Worth, Texas, the two designed and assembled a perforating gun to make use of this technique. They brought the gun to a wellsite in Corsicana and wired it directly onto the wireline of the logging unit. After the crew lowered the gun into the well, “the well was then fractured with excellent results, and it was decided to try three more wells the following week,” Gearhart said. The duo soon found more perforating opportunities in Louisiana and Oklahoma.
That year, the duo founded GO Oil Well Services (later Gearhart-Owen Industries). “After a few years, we were building as many as 300 units per year and our customer base enjoyed from 15 to 20% of the total market share,” Gearhart said.
Years later, Gearhart realized that there was a market for a modern digital-type logging recorder. With the help of a few technicians from Texas Instruments, Gearhart-Owen Industries landed its first job in 1975 to install the Direct Digital Logging system. “With that, we were able to enter the international arena and get better prices with higher margins of profit,” Gearhart said. He also became an early champion of measurement-while-drilling (MWD) technologies for horizontal drilling, which was still in its infancy.
By 1984, the company that began in a garage with a few good ideas had more than 13,000 employees in 27 countries and was the third-largest oilfield service company in the world, behind Schlumberger and Welex. In 1988, Gearhart Industries (Owen had left the company in 1978) was sold to Welex for about $500 million. The very next year, Gearhart founded drill bit and MWD company Rock Bit International (RBI). In 2005, he launched his current venture—Gearhart Companies—which specializes in tools and technologies for vertical and horizontal drilling.
At 84, Gearhart has no plans to retire from the oilfield business. He believes that developing shale gas will be the key to a stable and efficient energy mix in the US. “When I was in school, they taught me that you couldn’t produce from a shale. Well, hydraulic fracturing changed that,” Gearhart said. “We just have to convert to using the energy that’s there and available. If I wasn’t so dang old, I’d go into the fracturing business myself. I’m serious.” 
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