Strategy and Operations
Prior to going private in 2003, CEO Randeep Grewal stated that the firm was positioned so as to make a profit whether the price of oil was low or high. The asphalt plant functioned as a hedge. When oil was high, the company was able to sell on the open market the heavy crude they produced from the Cat Canyon, Santa Maria Valley, and North Belridge fields; when the price of oil is low, they used it instead to make asphalt at their Santa Maria refinery, since asphalt keeps a relatively constant price. In 2002, Greka announced that they possessed approximately 800 million barrels (130,000,000 m3) of heavy crude oil recoverable with current technologies. Greka was able to capture this resource since the heavy oil existed in a shallower, neglected reservoir, primarily the contained in the Sisquoc Formation. When the major oil companies – Union, Conoco, Shell, and others – extracted oil in the Santa Maria Valley from the 1920s to the 1980s, they mainly pumped from the deeper formations with lighter oil which was more valuable; when they pulled out of the county in the 1980s and 1990s, they left behind considerable reserves of difficult-to-extract heavy oil, which however made good feedstock for the asphalt refinery.
Greka operates wells at the North Belridge Oil Field in Kern County, the Casmalia, Cat Canyon, Zaca, and Santa Maria Valley Fields in Santa Barbara County, and through a subsidiary the Rincon Island in the Santa Barbara Channel south of Carpinteria, and the Richfield Oil Field in Orange County.
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Famous quotes containing the words strategy and, strategy and/or operations:
“Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war?”
—Bible: Hebrew, 2 Kings 18:20.
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—Colin Powell (b. 1937)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)