The University of Tulsa's Petroleum Engineering Department

Jarl P. Johnson says The University of Tulsa provided him with tools and principles that he has applied both in his personal life and in his half-century career in the oil and gas industry. “These tools included math and sciences, humanities - and some helpful hints on what to expect,” he says.

Jarl, who grew up in the Tulsa area and graduated from Central High School in 1948, said going to college was a given. But what to study? He chose petroleum engineering “even though I had never seen an oil well nor had I known anyone who worked for an oil company.”

Jarl said he was “quite serious” as a TU student. But he recalls that one day, following a huge win by the football team, “a group of students decided to encourage a walkout by parading in and out of classrooms with a large base drum.” But when they entered geology professor A. N. Murray’s room, “he promptly put his foot through the drum.”

After he graduated in 1953, he worked briefly for Phillips Petroleum, but then he spent 23 years with Kewanee Oil Co., much of that time in Tulsa as manager of engineering. “It was there that I became familiar with secondary recovery and authored several technical papers on the subject. I was also introduced to property evaluation and acquisition.”

When Kewanee was purchased by Gulf Oil in 1977, Jarl moved to Denver to become vice president of engineering for Hamilton Brothers Oil Co.

In 1980 Jarl was one of the founders of Ensource, Inc., a public company created from some 300 limited partnerships and three mergers. He evaluated the numerous properties that were to make up the company and provided information for the prospectus for the Securities and Exchange Commission filing. “On opening,” Jarl notes, “this was the largest offering ever made ($600,000,000) and the first company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange on its first day of business.” As vice president of operations, he set up the organization to manage 2,700 wells in 16 states.

Jarl left Ensource in 1986 and formed PetroJarl Inc., which acquired oil and gas interests that were operated by other companies.

The highpoint in his career came between 1989 and 1995 as an owner and president of Diamond Energy, a Tulsa company that acquired semi-depleted oil fields and implemented secondary recovery projects. Relying on both his engineering and business skills, “Diamond grew from a company with almost no production to the fourth largest crude oil producer in Oklahoma in five years.”

Diamond was then merged into Coda Energy, a public company in Dallas, where Jarl became vice chairman and chief operating officer. Coda was sold to Belco Energy in 1998, and a year later he “semi-retired” to become senior advisor to Belco, which was then acquired by Westport Resources. He took full retirement when Kerr-McGee acquired Westport, and then last August, PetroJarl was sold. “For the first time in 52 years,” he says with a wink, “I am unemployed.”

Jarl has a twin brother, Earl, also a 1953 TU graduate in petroleum engineering, who retired 11 years ago as president of Texaco’s exploration and production division and a corporate vice president.

His wife, Naydene Kelley, graduated from TU with a degree in business in 1951. They had known each other since junior high school, but became reacquainted years after their college studies.

They have four children: Marilyn, a professor at the University of Memphis; Gary, a TU alumnus (petroleum engineering, 1979) and executive with Grayhorse Energy in Tulsa; Kelley, a homemaker and community volunteer; and Karen, an institutional research assistant at OSU-Tulsa. The Johnsons have nine grandchildren.

Jarl enjoys landscaping and working in his wood shop and with his Koi pond. He and his wife have delivered Meals on Wheels for several years and have taught English as a Second Language at Vickery Meadow Learning Center in Dallas, which is a mission of their church, Preston Hollow Presbyterian. They have traveled to Alaska, Hawaii, Europe and Australia.

Jarl served on the Petroleum Industry Advisory Boards at Texas Tech and TU, and was active with the Society of Petroleum Engineers, which provided funding for scholarships in petroleum engineering at TU.

Jarl and Naydene have been members of TU’s President’s Council, Circle Society and the Golden Hurricane Club for many years. In 1998 they funded an endowed scholarship for petroleum engineering students at TU. “I believe education to be very important to anyone’s life.”

Jarl in his own words (excerpted from his acceptance speech at Induction Ceremony):

I thank the University of Tulsa for this incredible honor and I thank my family and friends for the honor of their being here this evening. I have been asked how the campus is different than it was when I was a student here. In addition to all the new buildings, I believe the food is better than I remembered. Things were different in the fall of 1948 when my twin brother, Earl, and I enrolled at TU’s downtown night school, which was located over Bell’s Clothiers between Main and Boston on Third Street. Our father supported a family of six children and various of our aunts, uncles and grandparents during the depression with a formal education that terminated in the 3^rd grade. He was so aware of the limitation of not having a formal education that he spoke to us of the importance of a formal education with a sermon-like fervor. He never talked about “If you go to college”, but “when you go to college.” Unfortunately, we didn’t talk much about “how.”

So, when we graduated from Central High in the Spring of 1948, we took full time jobs and enrolled in night school to keep our foot in the education door until we figured out the “how.” The following fall, we had saved some money, arranged to pay tuition by the month, exchanged full-time jobs for part-time jobs, and received an offer to stay at the home of Jack Robertson, a pre-med student. The place to stay was the enabling thing. I will say more about enabling things.

I was ready to go, but didn’t have a clue of what to enroll in. Help came from a Petroleum Engineering student who suggested Petroleum Engineering based on my three career objectives. Those were: (1) to be able to work out of doors, (2) wear clean khakis and (3) earn at least $500 a month.

I am pleased to report that at one point in my career, I met all three objectives.

It has been 52 years since I graduated from TU and it’s time that I reflect on that beginning. Emphasis wasn’t only on Petroleum Engineering at TU. We received Dr. Kaufmann’s Chemistry and math from Dr. Carter, Dr. Howard, Dr. Roth and Dr. Veatch, and Dr. Gardner’s Physical Chemistry. Who would have thought that we would need to know what a colloidal suspension was? And then there were “things.” Things from English, History, Political Science and Literature that would add to the human experience in the life of an engineer. There was that special thing that came in our first lecture in a course called “Strength of Materials”. The professor, I don’t recall his name, put on the board a large $ and said “Guys, this is what it is all about.” Then he drew a sketch of a bridge and said “Anyone can build a bridge that won’t fall down. Only an engineer can build one that will barely not fall down.”

I saw that bridge when I designed a pumping unit for a well. I knew that I didn’t want the biggest and best nor the cheapest, but one that would wear out and self destruct on the same day that the well went dry. I saw the $ everywhere:

1. When I first recognized that the company I worked for was not in the business to produce oil, but to make money.

2. When we drilled a well.

3. When we developed a risk analysis program which would allow us to compare the economics of drilling a well in the Gulf Coast, to one in the North Sea, to one on the North Slope to one drilled in Pittsburg County, OK.

4. I saw it again when we bought a property, sold a property, borrowed money from the bank, paid it back, formed a company, merged a company, and sold a company.

5. And all the while I knew that if the bridges started to fall the $ would fade.

Five minutes of one lecture of one course was an enabling thing to one student.

Early out of school, working for Phillips Petroleum Company, I was put in a roustabout gang. That was what they did to Petroleum Engineers in those days. I noticed that there were some pretty smart guys in the gang and that they knew a lot more about the business than I did. After all, that was the reason I was there. Yet, in a few weeks, I would be moving on to something better, but they wouldn’t. It was because I had the “ticket”, a certificate that said that I had a degree in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Tulsa. It was a ticket that would permit me to go where they couldn’t go — a ticket worth far more than it cost and had value greater than the knowledge gained in earning it. It was, you see, an enabling thing. It provided access to opportunities that would not have been vailable without it the rest of my life.

I was fortunate to be able to work with people who were willing to teach me what they knew, to give me advice and to show me by example how I should go. They were my mentors. I, in turn, tried to help those who were coming behind me.

I also noticed that there were opportunities to offer this kind of help beyond my career boundaries:

Establishing volunteer tutoring programs at Booker T Washington High School, at Celia Clinton, and Carver Jr. High Schools and several elementary schools.

Being a youth group sponsor at Church, serving as a councilor at summer camp, coaching Little League.

Central High School developed a mentoring program which paired an underachieving student with an alumnus who was willing to spend one hour a week as a mentor. The student that I was matched with wanted to be a writer. His grades were C’s and D’s with an F in English. Our first meeting went like this — “So you want to be a writer?”—“Yes sir”—“That means you plan to go to college”—“Yes sir, to TU”—“You’re not likely to make TU with grades like these.” He said “I thought all you had to be was smart.” My reply was “With these grades, how are they going to know you’re smart?” The next semester he earned A’s, B’s and one C.

It was a small enabling thing.

In Dallas, I became involved with a boot camp program which offered young men who were first time offenders an alternative to incarceration. This program introduced me to some rather overwhelming social problems: dysfunctional families, gangs, drugs, unacceptable behavior. There was a 17 year old boy who boasted of fathering 5 babies by 5 different teenage girls, and a group of six 12-14 year olds—only two knew their father, all had used drugs and two were selling drugs to support their mother’s habits. For several reasons, this program was not successful.

Some conclusions:

1. My Dad was right about the “education” thing.

2. We recognize that there are some overwhelming social problems.

3. We might not know the solution to these problems.

4. We might not have the capacity to solve them.

5. But not being able to solve the big problems offers us no pardon from taking on some of the smaller ones close at hand.

6. We do not know when the few dollars we can donate to a scholarship fund might represent “the last dollar in” that will enable some student to go to college.

7. We do not know when the information we give, the advice we offer, the example we set might enable someone to succeed in achieving something beyond his dream of working out of doors in clean khakis for $500 a month.

A final thing — to have had a good education, a job that I loved going to, a wife I loved coming home to, children and grandchildren to love and be proud of, good friends along the way, and now “this,” (induction into Hall of Fame) has been to have had a wonderful life.