Business // Energy

Geologists tap creative reservoir in naming offshore finds

Employees at LLOG Exploration Co. love the movie "Animal House," so when they discovered an oil field more than 18,000 feet below the sea floor in 2012, it made sense to name it after Bluto, the foul-mouthed degenerate played by John Belushi in the 1978 comedy.

Nearby, another discovery got similar treatment. Its namesake is Marmalard, the preppy president of Bluto's rival fraternity.

And the floating platform that will start producing from the wells next year? It's Delta House, after the home of the movie's misfit frat brothers.

"It's a very serious business," said Eric Zimmermann, vice president for geology at the Covington, La.-based company, "but its a place where we can have a little bit of fun."

Those aren't the only unusual names in LLOG's offshore portfolio. One of its top assets, located west of the Animal House plays, is called "Who Dat," for the chant belted out by fans of the New Orleans Saints football team. "Most of us are Louisiana natives," Zimmermann said. "We've been Saints fans."

Indeed, across the Gulf of Mexico, energy companies have given oil fields names that run the gamut from clever to creative to downright bizarre.

BHP Billiton is expecting hordes of production from its "Genghis Khan" field. Shell hopes its "Habanero" field will prove a hot prospect. And BP's pack of assets includes "Mad Dog."

The names are part of a decades-old tradition across the industry: In almost any oil company, it's not the marketing department or executives who decide the name of an offshore oil field. It's the geologist who finds it.

"It's a perk for people who put in the hard work to develop the prospects," said John Shepard, manager of Latin America exploration at Shell Oil Co., who previously worked on Gulf of Mexico projects. "It's a great example of bottom up, rather than top down."

Shell has pursued offshore oil fields named for cow breeds (Guernsey, Holstein, Angus), cartoon characters (Popeye, Bullwinkle, Rocky) and even famous physicists (Bohr, Kepler, Coulomb).

The names can get even more peculiar. One of BP's top projects in the Gulf of Mexico is called "Na-Kika," after the octopus god of the Gilbert Islands.

Some geologists choose names that rock.

Hess Corp. has a development called "Tubular Bells," named for the debut album of English rocker Mike Oldfield - although it's a relatively new field, discovered 30 years after the 1973 album release.

Chevron's "Blind Faith" is a reference to Eric Clapton's band.

The naming tradition serves important functions beyond indulging the whims of the people who discover the oil.

Onshore, oil fields typically are named after nearby geographic features like towns or streams, said Justin Devery, a deep-water Gulf of Mexico analyst for IHS who previously worked as a geologist at Unocal Corp.

Useful as a code

That doesn't really work in open ocean.

Federal leasing maps identify locations of offshore oil fields, but designate them in the dry language of government.

Who Dat, for example, is located in blocks 503, 546 and 547 of an area known as Mississippi Canyon.

Oil companies prefer shorthand that rolls more trippingly off the tongue.

The names also can serve as a code to prevent rivals from overhearing the exact spot where a company is considering purchasing a federal drilling lease. "If someone happens to overhear several of us talking about the 'Rover' prospect, they have no idea what we're talking about," Shepard said.

Shepard, who's worked for Shell since 1980, said the company originally used letters and numbers as code to mask the location of prospects it was considering. But that quickly become unwieldy. The first prospect he worked on was known simply as P-471. "I think they found the code numbers were almost as hard to remember as the block numbers they're referring to," he said.

In the earlier days of offshore exploration, the names of formations often were based on simple themes like shark species (Great White, Maco, Tiger), tools (Auger, Machete, Screwdriver) or royalty (Queen, King, Princess). Generally, leases in close proximity or purchased at one time followed a single such theme.

But as the industry used up the simplest themes, geologists had to get more creative.

Sometimes they chose names reflecting their interests or hobbies.

Shell has a group of prospects in the eastern Gulf of Mexico named for Civil War sites including Vicksburg, Gettysburg and Appomattox. Ted Godo, the Shell geologist who helped discover them, is a Civil War buff, Shepard said.

Physical characteristics of fields also may suggest names. An offshore field in Nigeria is called "Nsiko" - which means "lobster" in a native dialect - because its seismic image resembles the shape of the crustacean, said Bobby Ryan, Chevron's vice president for global exploration. A well drilled near Louisiana was named "Bear's Hump" when the seismic map reminded geologists of the distinctive feature on a grizzly's back.

Naming conventions can become difficult when multiple companies are involved in the same play.

When four oil companies teamed up on one prolific field in the 1990s, they faced a dilemma since they proposed four different names - Brachiosaurus, Alpha Centauri, HI-C and Anaconda. The final name was a subject of much debate.

"Finally one of my team leaders stood up with a cigarette in his mouth and said, 'We're wasting a lot of time. It's BAHA - all upper case - named after the first letters,'" Ryan said. The name stuck.

Employees sometimes favor names that lend themselves to visual images, mindful that the company may celebrate a find by designing logos for T-Shirts and caps.

A little too clever

Still, the process doesn't always go flawlessly.

"We picked a Hawaiian theme for one of our lease sales in the mid-1990s," said Cindy Yeilding, vice president of Gulf of Mexico appraisal for BP.

"It was kind of cute because we were thinking about having a nice lunch with Hawaiian shirts and a luau after the lease sale was over," she recalled. "The team got a little too clever. It was using true Hawaiian names, and we all got confused as to which prospect was which, so we had to rename them."

Exxon Mobil had a project at one point called Mickey, but its name was ultimately changed to Mica to avoid copyright concerns related to a certain cartoon mouse.

Shepard said Shell geologists used to name some prospects after their wives. But the company discourages that naming convention. "People figured out their spouse might not like it if they're hearing 'that's a terrible prospect,' " he said.

A bad prospect is one thing, but in a risky industry it's also possible a name will become synonymous with disaster.

After BP's Macondo well blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 rig workers and spilling millions of gallons of oil, media reported that, years earlier, a company employee had won the naming privilege in a charity fundraiser.

In 2002, BP changed the name of a major Gulf of Mexico discovery to "Thunder Horse" from "Crazy Horse," after descendants of the Oglala Lakota warrior said it was inappropriate to use his name.

The field got its name because a nearby salt formation was in the shape of a horse's head, Yeilding said, and the original name was a reference to the band affiliated with Neil Young - not the historical figure.

Most offshore prospects never reach production so their names remain largely unknown. "You never know which ones are going to survive," said Yeilding.

But when an oil company begins production at a named oil field and the name becomes public, it can serve as a legacy for employees involved. Company executives, financial analysts, and journalists around the world may use the term for decades.