Talking to Robert Reynolds is like getting a living history of the oil and gas industry in south Arkansas, where the roots of his pioneer family reach back six generations.
“My third great-grandparents moved to Union County before statehood, 1832,” Reynolds said.
Born and raised in El Dorado, he finished high school there before getting an engineering degree at Louisiana Tech University and another bachelor’s and an MBA at the University of Tulsa.
A petroleum engineer by training, he is in his 50th year in the industry. He spent five as a supervisor in oil and natural gas operations in Oklahoma, and then 44 years at Shuler Drilling in El Dorado, where he is now president.
In that time, he worked on 2,100 wells, digging for gas, oil and brine.
“Among other things, I worked with the predecessor of Lanxess [a German multinational with bromine production operations] in the design, drilling and completion of dozens of brine supply wells and brine disposal wells.”
The bromine that Lanxess and competitors like Albemarle extract from the brine goes into pesticides, water sanitation products, photography chemicals and fire retardants. Before bromine extraction took root in the 1950s, the brines of the Smackover geological formation were a troublesome byproduct of drilling for gas and oil.
That same brine is now prized for the lithium it contains, an element key to the production of lithium-ion batteries. Big companies like Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries are testing ways to unleash that lithium profitably.
“I have an appreciation for the geological phenomena which has placed lithium where it is today,” Reynolds said. “I have an understanding of the physical phenomena, and what it takes to get it out of the ground.”
He also has a deep appreciation for the oil and gas industry’s role in his native landscape. The historic south Arkansas oil boom began in January 1921 a mile southwest of El Dorado when Dr. Samuel T. Busey hit a gusher well, Busey No. 1.
Oil production spiked within months, and by 1922, 900 wells were operating in the state.
El Dorado was the capital of the boom, and by World War II, nearby Columbia County had the most productive oil field in the nation.
Then came the bust.
“For the lack of a better word, there have always been depressions, bursts of oil and gas prices,” Reynolds said. “The first occurred with the Great Depression in 1929, reducing oil prices by about 80%. There was an artificial suppression of natural gas prices following the Second World War” when the predecessor to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission returned postwar oil production back to owners but did not return gas production back to gas producers.
“As a result, they suppressed the price of natural gas far below a normal economic resolution of its price, and it severely curtailed exploration for oil and gas until basically 1980.”
The discovery of huge oil reserves in the Middle East drove oil prices to a historic low point around 1961 and 1962, he said. “There was an oil price increase in 1973 because of an Arab oil embargo of the United States, Canada and Western Europe because those countries supported Israel in its 1973 war,” Reynolds said. “There was a buildup of prices that reached its peak in 1981. But by 1987, the price had plummeted by more than 80% from 1981.
“So we’ve had booms and busts and more booms and busts. But since 1987, we’ve kind of been treading water,” he said.
Oil prices plunged at the start of the pandemic, but quickly recovered. A barrel of oil was trading at a little above $80 a barrel on Feb. 2, about where it was in September 2007, not accounting for inflation.
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