By Lauren Clark
JOHN MORK: A MAN OF ENERGY USC alumnus and benefactor John Mork ’70, MS ’12 built one of America’s top gas and oil companies from scratch. For an encore, he is helping lead a revolution in cheap, clean energy.
IN 1972, JOHN MORK WAS WORKING ON A UNOCAL OFFSHORE OIL RIG IN ALASKA WHEN HE GOT A CALL FROM HIS FATHER.
A wildcatter who had inspired his son to join the oil and gas exploration business, Roy Mork was then based in Gilmer County, W.Va., where natural gas reserves were attracting prospectors. He needed help digging a gas well. No problem, thought Mork, at the time a freshly minted USC petroleum engineering graduate. “In my mind, it was this little, simple thing,” he recalls. Mork imagined he would help his dad for a few weeks, then head back to his budding career at Unocal. But the task turned out to be complicated, fraught with technical issues involving a steep learning curve. Weeks turned into months. He ended up quitting Unocal — then one of the nation’s largest petroleum companies — to stay and help his father drill for natural gas. “It was a dream of his,” explains Mork, a member of USC’s Board of Trustees since 2006. Th e next few years were lean ones. “We had about $50,000 in assets, $100,000 in liability and no cash — I owed everybody money,” Mork chuckles. He and Julie — his new bride, business partner and fellow Southern California native — lived in a trailer. Th en, in 1976, they dug two productive wells. Mork had a hunch, informed in part by what he’d learned in geology classes at USC, that the patch of land furnishing those two wells had more to off er. He was right. Th ey developed that acreage, called the Northeast Benson Field, sinking an astonishing 200 straight wells without once coming up dry. “It was ridiculous,” Mork says in a slight drawl acquired over subsequent decades of doing business in Appalachia. Th at was the beginning of Energy Corporation of America (ECA), which today is among the top 50 energy companies in the country. Th e Denver-based corporation has gas- and oildrilling operations in the Gulf Coast, Montana and New Zealand, in addition to West Virginia. Its president and chief executive has the conÿ dent, easygoing manner of someone long accustomed to risk taking. In the past few years, Mork has positioned ECA at the vanguard of the United States’ natural-gas boom — a development courtesy of technology that can extract gas from places once considered inaccessible. He and other industry leaders believe we are about to enter an era of cheap, plentiful energy that could transform the U.S. economy. Th e success of ECA has lately enabled Mork to make as big a mark in philanthropy as he has in the energy industry. “He can be a tough businessman, but he’s got a lot of humanity mixed in there,” says USC Trustee Stanley Gold JD ’67, president and CEO of the investment company Shamrock Holdings, Inc. Th e Morks are among USC’s major benefactors. In 2005, they gave $15 million to name the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the USC Viterbi School
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of Engineering. And in 2010, they made an unprecedented donation of $110 million toward undergraduate scholarships. Mork Family Scholarships go to academically gifted students in engineering and science, among other ÿ elds — bright young people who Mork believes will make the most of the promising future he envisions. Th at includes people of low income. A number of Mork Family Scholarships are set aside each year for students in the USC Family of Schools in South Los Angeles. “HE’S A VERY PASSIONATE INDIVIDUAL for things he believes in,” says Daniel Epstein ’62, a fellow USC trustee and the chairman and founder of property management and real estate conglomerate ConAm, speaking of Mork. “He looks to the future — he sees the direction of things, areas where he can have an impact. Th at’s why he set up the scholarships.” Indeed, when Mork talks about the future, his enthusiasm is infectious, even as he makes startling predictions. Steel mills, fertilizers, chemicals — the very types of energy-intensive businesses that have been largely abandoned this country — are great investments, he says, with a gleam in his eye. “Th ose are going to come back to the United States, because we’ll have this inexpensive energy that’s being accessed from rocks that I was taught as a student were impermeable.” Th ose formerly impermeable rocks are called shale, and they underlie a huge swath of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and upstate New York across a geological formation known as the Marcellus Shale. ECA has 5,000 wells and holds leases on a million acres in the region. Drillers now can get at the natural gas trapped in the porous shale thanks to improvements in technology developed by Texas oilman George Mitchell in the 1990s. Th e method sends long segments of pipe horizontally underground like the roots of a tree, so more of the well is in contact with the source rock. A four-acre drilling operation can extract gas out of 600 acres of land, leaving the ground above unperturbed. With conventional drilling, that same 600 acres would be covered with wells. “Never in the history of mankind has any resource been harvested with as little intrusion on the environment,” says Mork, an early adopter of the technology. Each year, he notes, ECA plants 5,000 or more trees on or near its drilling locations. “John was one of the ÿ rst to drill horizontal wells in West Virginia,” says I. L. Morris, president and CEO of Waco Oil and Gas, a leading energy company in West Virginia. “He stayed with it and engineered it. He’s a pioneer here.” Mork hasn’t hoarded his knowledge. ECA-sponsored “shale summits” initiated by Mork’s son, Kyle, the company’s vice president of operations, have helped bring fellow oilmen like Morris and others up to speed on the technology. Th anks to these collaborative eff orts, the Marcellus Shale “is