Bob Tippee
Editor

With the perspective of a geophysicist who has worked as both an operator and service provider, Steven Tobias sees a troubling "disconnect" in the upstream oil and gas business.

"At the same time that you have high-technology service companies scrambling for work, there are large companies wondering why they can't generate prospects or develop fields properly," says Tobias, a cofounder and vice-president, exploration, of South Bay Resources LLC, Houston.

The problem isn't the absence of technical tools; rather, it's the absence of time and sometimes inclination of professionals at oil and gas companies to learn about them.

"There are very few stupid or bad people left in the business," Tobias says. "But when the exploration manager gives you a task to do and you have to work these many blocks for the sale or these fields, you don't have time to learn all these new technologies."

Tobias and his two partners in the private operating company they founded just over a year ago are, as he describes it, applying big-company technology to small-company prospects. The firm has discovered commercial hydrocarbons in two out of the three wells it has so far drilled to previously overlooked targets in a mature area of Matagorda County, Tex.