Offshore Driller
JOHN W. BATES JR. '41 started in business as a roughneck and is still dealing in crude. Oil that is.
The debonair Bates worked summers in high school and college as a "roughneck" or unskilled worker on a drilling rig in Tulsa's oil fields and is now Chairman of the Board of Reading & Bates' thirteen companies and subsidiaries, pioneers in offshore drilling. Their assets total $70 million, putting them among the world's top ten drilling firms.
Their $35 million annual gross is derived 84 per cent from contract drillers and oil producers, 15 per cent from oil and gas exploration, and one per cent from ocean engineering.
Much of the world's oil is now coming from under the sea via sophisticated marine hole cutting. But, as Bates explains, "Oil is oil no matter where it's from. It all originates from marine depositions."
His companies have thirteen offshore rigs and seventeen land rigs, with R&B flags flying in the United States and Canada, England and the North Sea, and Germany and Denmark. A recent issue of Petroleum Engineer recalls that Bates formed the R&B Drilling Company in Odessa, Texas, with C. P. Baker in 1946 shortly after he was released from duty as a wartime Navy pilot. R&B was consolidated with Reading & Bates, Inc. in 1953, a firm originally started by his father, and Bates returned to Tulsa to help build the firm into a successful land drilling concern active from Texas to Canada.
Bates and his partner, Charlie Thornton, sized up the offshore play early and formed Reading and Bates Off-shore, offering the first stock in 1956 for around $2 million. R&B's expansion offshore opened in high gear and hasn't slowed down since. In 1957 another stock offering drew $2.3 million for further growth.
Petroleum Engineer calls R&B's marine maneuvers "ultra ambitious and expensive." The company's two offshore drilling tenders are worth a reported $2.5 million each. Drilling can be carried on in any depth of water where the tenders can be anchored. The company put together in 1962 and has since patented the world's only drilling catamaran.
Such investment is good business, Bates points out, since drilling of one type or another is currently under way in offshore areas of some 60 countries. Increased tempo is certain in Australia, Indonesia, and Borneo in another couple of years, he notes, and South Africa is ready to blossom. In short, the future looks great for the offshore drilling business.
"We feel that our services and equipment will be utilized extensively in finding and developing these new reserves," he says in the confident, straightforward manner that has won an army of friends in the industry's drilling and operating segments.
A cool guy in a hot business, he is still a rated pilot, doing much of his own flying in R&B's Lear jet while traveling some 250,000 business miles a year. He is an Elder in the Presbyterian Church; serves as Chairman of the Board of the Tulsa Psychiatric Foundation; and is active in several capacities in other civic programs, as well as serving on the Board of Directors of the First National Bank in Tulsa.
For a man this busy maintaining a golf handicap of ten is pretty creditable. At least creditable enough to preclude bringing in another gusher when he uses an iron on an Oklahoma fairway.
