Public servant
Tim Baker, director of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s Oil and Gas Conservation Division, retires today after four decades on the job.
Institutional memory and experience are as valuable as crude pumped from the ground.
Oklahomans will lose a big chunk of that experience as Tim Baker, director of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s Oil and Gas Conservation Division, closes out 40 years of public service when he retires Friday.
Baker has worked for 38 years at the commission, leading the 122 employees in its oil and gas division the past four.
Along the way, he managed the division’s field operations and technical services units before taking over its pollution abatement unit. He continued to hold that post until a month ago, in addition to serving as the division’s director.
His career gave him the chance to witness the never-ending ups and downs of the Sooner State’s oil and gas industry. While those were driven to a large extent by crude and natural gas prices, technology also played a role.
“That is what really turned the industry upside down,” Baker said.
Booms, busts
Baker graduated from the University of Kansas 1976 with a geology degree into a booming oil and gas industry.
Baker, however, wasn’t interested in driving development of new oil and natural gas plays and instead focused on environmental issues. He took his first job with the Oklahoma Water Resources Board to deal with water pollution complaints.
In 1978, he joined the industrial waste division of Oklahoma’s Department of Health to work with its underground injection control team, and moved to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission in 1980 to do the same work.
But business was booming (there were more than 1,000 rigs running in Oklahoma at the time), and so was the commission’s workload.
“When they found out I was a geologist, they put me into the oil and gas conservation division’s
technical services office (the unit that handles drilling and spacing orders) for my first three years,” he recalled.
Baker said the agency and oil and gas operators had none of today’s modern conveniences.
“Everything was on paper, and we were having to research everything by hand to make sure the orders were correct,” he recalled. “A permit to drill was not much bigger than a postcard, at the time.”
The agency, he said, processed more than 400 drilling permits during a single day at one point during the early 1980s, and typically processed anywhere from 500 to 800 permits weekly during that boom.
The load forced it to hire part-time employees, putting them to work at desks in building hallways. Baker observed the only way staff could talk to an operator either was on the phone, or in person.
“Your phone literally would ring all day long. A lot of people couldn’t get through, so they would just walk to your office,” which meant a constant line of people outside, he said.
“Words really cannot explain how crazy it was back then.”
The commission, he added, was forced to hire a structural engineer to evaluate whether or not its building could support the additional weight all that paper generated before the boom had ended.
“It was quite a spectacle,” he said.
After the failure of Penn Square Bank, oil prices collapsed, Oklahoma’s oil and gas economy went into a shell and state officials were forced to begin using general revenues to help support the commission and its operations.
The agency, meanwhile, undertook a massive project to convert all of the paper processed during the boom into microfilm and later into digital data.
Evolution
Part of the 1980s boom was spurred by technological advances making it possible to drill deeper than ever before.
And while hydraulic fracturing had been around since World War II, its coupling with recent horizontal drilling advances impacted the industry just as much the past decade.
The work the commission conducts to support the industry also has become more complex, as spacing and permitting rules had to be updated to accommodate today’s horizontal wells, Baker observed.
One thing that has remained unchanged throughout Baker’s tenure, however, are potential pollution concerns posed by saltwater, drilling mud and crude oil. Associated environmental concerns have climbed as issues have been raised about injection- and completion-induced earthquakes and other matters.
When Baker became manager of the oil and gas division’s underground injection control unit in 1985 and took over the division’s pollution abatement unit four years later, he said environmental concerns often were treated as an afterthought by oil and gas operators of the day.
“Now, environmental issues are chief among the concerns of our major operators. They want to make sure they comply,” he said.
Baker said he has enjoyed his career of serving Oklahomans and the state’s oil and gas industry as it has evolved.
“I would have to say the technology developed to drill deep was amazing,” he said, “but horizontal drilling technology and what it allows operators to do is one of the most incredible things I have seen.”
As for the future, Baker said his immediate plans involve spending time with his family.
“You never want to eliminate all your options, but my wife and I have a lot of things we want to do, so I think we are going to stay busy for a while.”