Interview with Julie Kowan, J. Kowan Consulting, LLC
Q: What is your educational and professional background?
A: I have a B.S. from Rutgers University and a M.S. from Brown University. Both of my degrees are in Geology. My concentration in graduate school was Tectonophysics, where I tested a proposed method of earthquake prediction. In my initial job search I found the oil and gas industry jobs far more interesting and appropriate for my skillset than any others I looked at. I went to work for GeoMechanics International (GMI) straight out of my graduate work in early 2005 and I loved it. It was just such a great group of people to learn from and work with and the problems we were solving were really interesting. GMI was bought by Baker Hughes in 2008. I stayed on through the transition and found I enjoyed working with petrophysicists, completion engineers and reservoir modelers trying to provide integrated solutions to clients.
Q: How have you seen geomechanics in oil and gas change over the course of your career?
A: The increase in technology and personnel being dedicated to understanding and exploiting unconventional resources has been pretty astonishing. I was a few years into my career before unconventionals started getting much attention from the geomechanics community and I’ve seen that evolve from geomechanics specialists looking at just wellbore stability issues to actually working with completion engineers and reservoir modelers to try to design smarter fracs and optimize well spacing to improve overall recovery and economics.
Q: You had the perspective of witnessing this industry downturn from within a big oil and gas service provider. What was it like in the year or two leading up to your own layoff?
A: It was not a happy time. I think layoffs among my immediate coworkers started in January of 2015 and it was tough watching such talented people leave. I was working in a consulting group and actually stayed pretty busy until fall of 2015. Our manager succeeded in keeping us working as long as possible, but by January of 2016, work was so slow that it was a bit of a shock every month that our team did not have layoffs. The only upside is that I was not surprised when I was let go and I knew lots of people I could call for advice!
Q: Do you think women in geomechanics have been affected by the industry-wide layoffs more than men?
A: I’ve had the good fortune to work on teams with very high percentages of women in technical roles. I don’t know the statistics, but that also means I know a lot of women in geomechanics who are now out of work.
Q: Someone from Baker Hughes once commented on LinkedIn that Baker is going to “reinvent” geomechanics. Any idea what that means?
A: I don’t want to guess at what was meant by that comment, but if companies continue to lay off their geomechanics experts, they will have to reinvent the field when there is work! I understand there are strong economic drivers behind these massive “reduction in force” layoffs, but it is hard to see so much expertise and experience lost.
Q: What has it been like for you to set up your own consultancy? What was easy, and what was hard? What have been some of your successes and what are some ongoing challenges?
A: The process of forming a LLC was not difficult, though some of the accounting issues were new to me, as was being my own IT support person. I have those logistical problems under control now, but an ongoing challenge is promoting my business, which as an employee of a large service company, I was somewhat removed from.
Q: What are some geomechanics projects you are working on right now, either for a client (no names, of course) or just as research?
A: The bulk of the work I have been doing has been related to business development. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of analysis work out there to be honest. We all want to position ourselves to be first in line for work when operators start drilling challenging wells again, so business development is very important right now. I do have a couple of interesting potential projects on the horizon, but it would be premature to say anything about those at the moment.
Q: Do you plan to keep up your membership in professional organizations and attend conferences now that you are independent? And why or why not?
A: Definitely! My main goal is stay active and engaged and do some geomechanics while riding out this downturn, so I am making it a priority to keep up my memberships and attend conferences. I am an active member of SPWLA, currently serving as Secretary of the Boston Chapter, which I helped found in August of 2015, along with my fellow officers Drew Pomerantz, Ravi Viswanathan and Tancredi Botto. I recently co-authored a presentation with Jason Pitcher on converting mature oil and gas fields to geothermal fields at an AAPG GTW, Making Money from Mature Fields. My membership in SPE is also current.