It’s not often you hear of a Calgary energy company that has been around for 50 years. It is similarly rare to learn of a small team of individuals who have been with said company for 20, or even 30+ of those years. Yet that is the case with GLJ Ltd., an energy consulting group and its executive team, comprised of President and CEO, Jodi Anhorn, COO Tracy Bellingham, CCO Chad Lemke and CFO Alan Withey.
Launched as a two-person professional consulting services firm in the early 1970s, a number of different partners joined and then retired over the years. Eventually three partner names – Gilbert, Laustsen and Jung – were retained in acronym form as the firm’s name.
“Our core service has always been independent analysis of company reserves,” explains Anhorn, who joined GLJ in 1993 after graduating with a Masters in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering from the University of Calgary.
As an Independent Qualified Reserves Evaluator (IQRE), GLJ’s team works with clients on a variety of corporate purposes and needs. “Often, it’s reserves analysis, transaction support, comparative benchmarks, risk analysis or integrated studies,” Anhorn notes. “This all comes from a technical understanding of the assets. Sometimes, a technical peer review is of most value to our clients.”
Importantly, GLJ is fully independent from the assets and projects it evaluates. “We take no financial interest in them,” Anhorn says, “the technical work we do is at a level of unbiased opinion which is critical and required in many cases.”
Of course while independent, GLJ is paid by the firm that hires it. “Even though we are hired by our clients, we aim to build a strong working relationship based on our professional, technical understanding of the project,” Anhorn explains. “Opinions can differ, so it’s an interesting dynamic that keeps people sharp. GLJ’s reputation makes us a trusted partner in the marketplace and we pride ourselves on providing smart, technical and independent opinions.”
That solid reputation has engendered GLJ’s success over half a century. “We grew as the energy industry grew in Calgary,” Anhorn reflects. “We had a real big growth spurt – as did the whole city – through the 1970s and early 1980s.”
“We ride the tides with the oil and gas industry,” he continues, “and that’s been the impetus to diversify our services. To make us more resilient, take our skillset abroad, and build out our client offerings.”
The commodity price crash of 2014-2015 in particular, sparked a push to diversify. “In 2018, we started to build our focus beyond traditional oil and gas,” Anhorns recounts. “We started to do a lot more subsurface work as it relates to geothermal, lithium and brine projects, and built a sustainability team that helps clients with emissions reduction and carbon management. We’ve been very intentional about growing our service offerings. COVID was a rough time, but since then we’ve been quite successful in seeing an uptick in both our traditional core services of oil and gas reserves and other business lines.”
Today, the majority of the business remains in traditional oil and gas reserves analysis, with a growing client base in new areas.
One of these is carbon capture and storage, specifically as it relates to how companies manage their carbon dioxide emissions. GLJ’s team will help clients create strategies to deal with those emissions, navigate the regulatory landscape, and determine funding.
GLJ also provides integrated studies using its technical expertise to help a client build a development plan that optimizes their assets. “We help them understand and optimize the assets they have,” Anhorn explains. “We work really closely with the client. To some extent, it’s as if we become a small engineering and geoscience extension within the company to help them build out and optimize the assets.”
GLJ is also involved in geothermal projects, particularly in parts of the world where the economics make sense: “Areas where the thermal gradient is better and you’re displacing very expensive power. Europe is a concentrated area for it. There is political will to do it and almost no other natural resources for energy. There is a big political push to develop geothermal resources there.”
Lithium is another up and coming area for GLJ, who works for Canadian companies on projects around the world. “For example, we’re working on a project for Vulcan Energy Resources on an existing geothermal-lithium production facility in the Rhine Valley of Germany,” Anhorn says. “They’re doing a combined process to bring up hot water for geothermal but also extracting lithium on site. We’ve worked in the same manner we would with traditional reserves to do a competent person’s report or an independent analysis.”
The company also works on hydrogen and helium projects. “Most of where we get involved in the hydrogen services is as it relates to the creation of blue hydrogen [breaking down methane molecules to get hydrogen and carbon atoms],” he explains, “or the creation of underground hydrogen storage caverns.” Helium is more of a traditional exploration play, and GLJ’s clients in this field are true exploration companies.
“One example of our service offerings is the Reserve Addendum,” Anhorn notes. “In an increasingly complex and regulated world, the Sustainability and Emissions Management team, in collaboration with the Reserves Evaluations teams, has developed an addendum informed by global sustainability standards. This additional lens of technical and economic scrutiny supports an increased understanding of clients’ O&G assets.”
GLJ’s team also provides price forecasts. “We have a team that looks at market pricing in all areas our clients do business,” he says. “We have a chief engineer and economist who work on this throughout the year. Every quarter we publish independent price forecasts of where we think the main markets will be in Canada, the U.S. and worldwide.”
The company’s client roster includes around 200 companies today, ranging from large public companies like Suncor, Tourmaline, Shell Canada and ARC, to mid-sized independents all the way down to some very small oil and gas companies.
“It really runs the gamut,” Anhorn says. “Some of these companies have very well established engineering teams and they’ll hire us for one scope, while others don’t. So, they’ll bring us in to do a lot of their technical engineering or geoscience work.”
As a 100 per cent employee-owned private company, GLJ has roughly 100 employees in Calgary, comprised of engineers, geological teams, business and economic analysts, securities and market analysis, IT professionals and an accounting group. “Being owners means employees are very thoughtful about what we’re doing,” Anhorn remarks. “They ask good questions and care about the business.”
“We believe that being a sustainable company is really everyone’s goal,” he continues, “and we take that part very seriously. To us, that means being a good citizen in Calgary, our home. We are active participants in the community and generate internal sustainability reports.”
“Our key asset is our people,” Anhorn says. “It may sound little bit trite, but it’s true for us. We don’t own hard assets; our people are literally what drive our consultancy services. We focus on making sure there’s good work life balance. It’s important that our staff feels like they have a nice place to work.”
While a strong and stable backbone of the economy, North America’s energy industry isn’t in growth mode, so GLJ is being thoughtful about expanding internationally. “We’ve had a lot of good success in Latin America and Europe,” he offers. “Our business is largely about relationships. People have to know you’ve got the skillset required. They want to work with an established firm like us. So, we’re just getting our name out there, both in terms of our traditional services and the new emerging energy space.”
