By Hanaba Munn Welch
In the world of oil and gas, the word “play” is a verb to Ken Morgan. It’s all about getting in the game.
Morgan is director of both the TCU Energy Institute and TCU’s new School of Geology, jobs that keep him where the action is in world of oil and gas.
Before the current boom, he had already earned his laurels, having begun his career at TCU in 1978 as a bright young professor interested in pioneering computer imaging. Under his leadership, the university established the Center for Remote Sensing and GIS (geographic information systems).
“That was my claim to fame for 20 to 25 years,” he said. “I had a great career—travel, communications, getting to know people.”
His slogan was “Have Images, Will Travel.” Much has changed since those early days.
“You can’t even imagine the fortune I spent on data tapes that now you can stream right into your phone,” Morgan said. “It was my first foray into working with industry. I did a fair amount of work with space shuttle imagery.”
Morgan’s achievements and skills eventually took him to an associate dean’s position at TCU—a rewarding place to be at the end of roughly three decades that had seen computer imaging reach amazing levels of sophistication.
Then Mitchell Energy began drilling into the Barnett Shale, and Morgan’s adrenaline kicked in. So much for laurels. “I wanted to put my football helmet back on and get back in the game instead of being an administrator,” he said.
That he did. Now Morgan is wearing not one but two helmets. If anything, he’s a quarterback. Morgan is director of the TCU Energy Institute, started in 2007, and also director of the university’s new School of Geology, Energy, and the Environment.
Both community and alumni support helped TCU launch the Energy Institute. No doubt, Morgan’s work over the years with industry and his contacts were a plus. As for the new school, the name reflects TCU’s recognition of the importance of the environmental disciplines in the realm of energy studies. “We came up with the ‘School of Geology, Energy, and the Environment’ because we think that’s the trend,” Morgan said.
Energy studies are much in vogue with TCU students, not just as major fields of study but also as minors. “Energy is the cool thing to go into,” Morgan said. “The energy minor has attracted over 300 non-energy majors. Half of the energy minors are business majors.”
Energy is also a popular minor among political science and journalism majors.
If Morgan sounds like he has his finger on the pulse of the student body, he does. Among his other responsibilities, he teaches introductory geology to freshmen—not the task of choice for most professors of Morgan’s stature. But obviously he likes the challenge of educating the uneducated at a basic level. It’s something he does not just on the TCU campus but also outside the academic setting.
“Ken’s a natural-born teacher,” said Ed Ireland, a TCU Energy Institute board member. “He has a great ability to teach concepts in geology and energy and state them in a way that people really understand.”
The Barnett Shale play, particularly significant for its proximity right under the city of Fort Worth, has ushered in a whole new genre of royalty owners, as have other developing shale plays across the country. When Barnett Shale landmen started showing up on Fort Worth doorsteps, Morgan recognized the need for people to understand what was happening. Morgan is especially adept at explaining royalty issues, whether to the uninitiated or, in greater depth, to more sophisticated learners.
“We were just looking for some place to make a difference,” Morgan said. “We didn’t see much out there for royalty owners.”
Now anyone who wants to understand royalty issues from any perspective can take courses through either of TCU Energy Institute’s programs—(1) Royalty Owner Program and (2) Advanced Royalty Owner Program—in places like Midland, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Big Spring.
“The people teaching are lawyers who are trying to balance the playing field between the royalty owner and the company, so there is a much better understanding for the royalty owners of what the producing companies will need and [what they] hope to get out of a producing lease,” Morgan said.
The courses offer opportunities for mineral owners to learn about protecting their rights, both present and future. “They look at things they might add as clauses to make it a good deal on both sides,” Morgan said.
“History, the future, and what’s likely to be coming” are part of the discussion, he added.
Often entire families participate, especially when much is at stake. Not only have the royalty courses proved popular for the urban residential set, but also for people with vast property holdings, including ranches in the Permian Basin.
“When we hold one here [Fort Worth] or in Midland, it’s not just the landowners but all the family members—not just Mom and Pop,” Morgan said. “They want the kids there. These family groups are investing in this [education] so they can all protect their assets. A lot of the families just want to know what’s going on, what is horizontal drilling, from someone they can trust.”
The National Association of Royalty Owners (NARO) has teamed up with TCU Energy Institute to help present the information.
“They were anxious for us to offer something,” Morgan said. “We’ve had NARO on our side. One of our teachers has been in NARO for 30 years. He’s very seasoned.”
It’s the nature of things that royalty matters involve two sides—mineral owner versus production company—but educating mineral owners, especially the most naïve, hasn’t been all bad for oil and gas producers.
“We sort of help them [the mineral owners] go in there with a fighting chance,” said John Baum, associate director of the TCU Energy Institute. “Our belief is a knowledgeable mineral owner is actually easier to work with than somebody who doesn’t have any idea what they’re doing. They can’t expect the oil company to give the ship away. Oil companies have to make money in order to stay in business.”
Baum retired from teaching at TCU to work with Morgan and the Energy Institute.
“We decided that there are hundreds of programs out there for the oil and gas professionals,” Baum said. “But there are not programs, that we have been able to find, that are university-based that are available to mineral owners.”
“It’s taken us a little while to get traction,” Morgan said. “We just got geared up about a year ago.”
Based on the needs of various people who deal with royalty issues—not just the owners of minerals but also lawyers, bank trust officers, accountants, land managers, and other people who deal with royalties—the curriculum covers a broad range of information.
“We listen to people,” Morgan said.
It’s likely his ability to listen as well as to expound, explain, clarify, and promote, is a reason for Morgan’s success at ascertaining needs and meeting them.
He also spends time looking ahead. Whether he’s as good at predicting the future long-term as he is at teaching, he’s propelled to do much of what he does because of his concerns as to where the United States and the rest of the world will be energy-wise and economy-wise several years from now—situations tied to each other.
“If you want to get people out of mud huts in Africa, how are we going to do it?” he asked. “Cheap energy wins if you want to help them.”
Alternative energy?
“Wind, solar, biofuel—they just don’t pack the wallop you need,” he said.
Not that Morgan eschews everything but oil and gas. He and TCU are involved in one of the state’s biggest wind farms. But he’s betting on oil and gas to be the most important factor in America’s future, meaning North America—not just the United States.
“The U.S., Canada and Mexico—we can position ourselves in a good way,” he said. “China is eclipsing the Middle East. That is the long-term prediction. The projections are they will dominate the energy scene down the road. Throw in India. The game is beginning to change.”
He’s acutely aware of the United States’ “17 trillion-dollar debt with no end in sight.”
“We’re already floating a debt that’s hard to swallow,” he said. “Inflation is an insidious cancer. That inflation could come in a hurry. A buffer is needed. We’ve been living on borrowed time. How lucky we are to have seen these shales come on.”
Oil and gas are assets, already critical to the economy, will likely be more important in the future, per Morgan. “We could wake up and have such turmoil in global prices of oil—$150 a barrel or higher,” he said. “That’s a sledge hammer to the economy.”
It’s reason enough for the United States to develop its own energy resources. “We can position ourselves in a good way,” he said.
Morgan is counting on natural gas to play a key role. Already he drives a Honda that runs on compressed natural gas. “We have natural gas here that the rest of the world wants,” he said.
But if the United States doesn’t work toward energy independence, he believes the results could be disastrous. “We could run into an out-of-control energy situation and spend more and more out of the economy to keep things going,” he said. “Cheap energy wins, and people shouldn’t forget it.”
Even when he is cautionary–whether regarding the national debt or the environmental drawbacks to various kinds of energy–Morgan stays positive. For example, the challenge to make the frac’ing process better, cleaner, and safer means more job opportunities in the petroleum industry and helps support energy independence for the United States. “We spend our own money for our own jobs in our own industry to make it the cleanest and safest,” Morgan said.
He smiles to think of his childhood experiences in the business during an era when safety rules weren’t so stringent and he went with his dad on Saturdays and climbed around on storage tanks at Kerr McGee terminals. “Back then it was no big deal,” Morgan said.
His father, Tom Morgan, was a terminal manager, and his work took the family from their home in Nashville to Wisconsin, Indiana, and Florida. Little did Morgan realize as a child he would end up in the petroleum industry.
Music is another interest the two men share. It’s the career his father, now 85, left behind in Nashville. Morgan jokes that his mother, Maxine, suggested to his dad that he get a real job. But the elder Morgan, a stand-up bass player, had worked as a session musician of some stature, playing at Ryman Auditorium when it was home to the Grand Ole Opry. Like his father, Ken Morgan also plays bass—electric rather than stand-up. He’s the bass player for a band called “The Rock Docs,” currently comprising three PhD’s plus some students.
Morgan’s wife, Tamie, is a kindred spirit in the petroleum realm. A geologist and mapping specialist, she now runs the GIS lab started by Morgan. “We talk shop pretty good,” he said.
The couple has two sons—Hayden, who’s studying physics and engineering at TCU, and Kenton, a communications student at the university, whose goal is to have his own radio talk show.
Kenton Morgan’s cerebral palsy led Ken Morgan into one of his other areas of interest—All Star Equestrian, therapy for people with disabilities. Kenton Morgan has been riding since he was 4. “We have a race at the Stockyards for those kids,” Morgan said, referring to the Stockyard Easter Run.
Veronica Merrill, Morgan’s executive assistant at the Energy Institute, helps manage the event. She also sings with the band. “We run 24-7 if we need to get it done,” Morgan said.
Morgan’s willingness to work around the clock and to draw others into his various orbits speaks of one more kind of energy—the enthusiastic kind a good quarterback can exude in a huddle and rely on to carry a team to victory.
It helps that he believes in his playbook.