Oct 13, 2026 · 23 min · 8 segments
Host Patrick Rutty connects with Senior Regional Manager Chester Chua to talk about the sustained offshore exploration activity in the Bohai Bay and South China Sea, the various play types CNOOC are…
Chester ChuaGuest
Patrick RuttyHost
I, I was back in Denver in January of this year, hanging out with some, uh, with some fr- old friends and colleagues at a, at a well-known watering hole called The Rio Grande in, in Lower Downtown in Denver.
in addition to an oil and gas connection, we've got a Dartmouth College connection.
And I was chatting with him, and we were chatting about this, that, and the other, and he told me that Baylis...
So R- Rob Baylis works for a company called Robert Baylis, Robert L. Baylis, um, which was founded, I believe, by his dad.
And, uh, they've got an override in the Beetaloo Basin, which just blew me away.
Um, and so I'm gonna go through this little history, which is also, um, uh, partly thanks to a guy named Matt Silverman, another Denver guy who's a fantastic, um, geology historian.
But in, like, the late '80s and early '90s, you've got this Rio Tinto subsidiary, Pacific Oil & Gas, that shoots 2,000 kilometers of seismic based on, you know, s- uh, indications that people had already seen.
And they drilled, like, 11 wells in the basin, and they found a very rich, very old...
And this is, for you geo- geo nerds out there, this is mesoproterozoic source rocks.
In the early 1990s, you got a guy named Bill Peabody, who's a New Mexico geologist with Austra- Australian experience.
He pitches it to two Rockies oilmen from Farmington, New Mexico, Robert L. Baylis, my friend Rob Baylis's dad, and a guy named Tom Dugan.
They form Sweetpea Petroleum, a company called Sweetpea Petroleum, to chase what, you know, what we now know to be a shale play.
Sweetpea negotiates with the, with the [chuckles] Northern Territory government and the Northern Land Council.
Um, uh, a- and the talks were apparently led by some... their Australian rep, a guy named Malcolm Jerry Gerard.
I, I was back in Denver in January of this year, hanging out with some, uh, with some fr- old friends and colleagues at a, at a well-known watering hole called The Rio Grande in, in Lower Downtown in Denver.
in addition to an oil and gas connection, we've got a Dartmouth College connection.
And I was chatting with him, and we were chatting about this, that, and the other, and he told me that Baylis...
So R- Rob Baylis works for a company called Robert Baylis, Robert L. Baylis, um, which was founded, I believe, by his dad.
And, uh, they've got an override in the Beetaloo Basin, which just blew me away.
Um, and so I'm gonna go through this little history, which is also, um, uh, partly thanks to a guy named Matt Silverman, another Denver guy who's a fantastic, um, geology historian.
But in, like, the late '80s and early '90s, you've got this Rio Tinto subsidiary, Pacific Oil & Gas, that shoots 2,000 kilometers of seismic based on, you know, s- uh, indications that people had already seen.
And they drilled, like, 11 wells in the basin, and they found a very rich, very old...
And this is, for you geo- geo nerds out there, this is mesoproterozoic source rocks.
In the early 1990s, you got a guy named Bill Peabody, who's a New Mexico geologist with Austra- Australian experience.
He pitches it to two Rockies oilmen from Farmington, New Mexico, Robert L. Baylis, my friend Rob Baylis's dad, and a guy named Tom Dugan.
They form Sweetpea Petroleum, a company called Sweetpea Petroleum, to chase what, you know, what we now know to be a shale play.
Sweetpea negotiates with the, with the [chuckles] Northern Territory government and the Northern Land Council.
Um, uh, a- and the talks were apparently led by some... their Australian rep, a guy named Malcolm Jerry Gerard.
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