Ryan Lance: The Distinction of Leadership, and a Love for Montana Tech

By David McCumber, The Montana Standard

Montana Tech’s graduates are well known for a remarkable work ethic, for a practical approach to problem-solving that comes from rural Montana roots, and for their level of preparedness. Those attributes almost invariably lead to success in their chosen fields.

Ryan Lance is Exhibit A.

Lance, a 1984 graduate in Petroleum Engineering, has since 2012 been chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips, the world’s largest independent oil and gas exploration, development, and production company.

One constant in his 37-year career: His loyalty to his alma mater in Butte.

On September 24th, Lance was presented with Montana Technological University’s first-ever Chancellor’s Award of Distinction. It’s the highest honor Tech bestows, in recognition of an alumnus or friend of the university whose outstanding personal and professional accomplishments and community service have brought distinction to the school.

“There is no one who better exemplifies Montana Tech’s success at preparing our graduates to assume leadership in advancing science, engineering, and technology to benefit society,” Tech Chancellor Les Cook said.

It would be hard to imagine anyone more deserving of Tech’s highest award—and yet it’s a relationship that almost never started.

Ryan Lance’s parents are from small Montana towns—his father from Ryegate, his mother Wolf Point. So as his father’s career as an Air Force officer progressed, taking the family all over the place, Montana was always “home.” In the summers, Lance said in an interview Thursday, the Lance kids would often go back to his mother’s family farm in Wolf Point. Then, in 1977, his father got a chance to cap his Air Force career in a leadership role at the 341st Strategic Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, and Lance was able to go to Great Falls High for all of high school. He played football and golf, and did very well in school.

Both his mother and his father were Montana State University alums. His older siblings went there. So he just assumed he’d pursue an Engineering degree from Montana State.

But along the way, his father, driving through Butte, decided to stop and see Montana Tech. He looked around, met the registrar, and came away impressed.

“He said, ‘Ryan, you really need to go look at Montana Tech,’” Lance recalls. “So four of my buddies and I—five of the top 10 in the 1980 graduating class—decided to go over and look together. We all wanted to be engineers of some sort, we weren’t sure what variety.”

“In a day and a half, we fell in love with the place.”

Lance said that “once I got there, it really felt—more than at Bozeman or Missoula—that I was a person, not a number. There were only about 2,000 students, and the freshman class in the Petroleum Engineering department had only 35–40 kids.

“Tech had an amazing professor named Gustav Stolz,” Lance said. “He was in charge of outplacement for Petroleum Engineering, and he was incredibly connected in the industry. He got all of us internships and jobs. He got me a job roughnecking in the summer and I fell in love with the industry.”

“One great thing about Montana Tech was that the professors mostly came from the industry,” Lance said, “and they had this incredible marriage of the theoretical—book smarts—and knowledge of the real world. They’d teach us what the book said, then they’d close it and say, ‘Let me tell you how it really works.’ And that’s still unique to Tech to this day.”

For Lance, the hard part about choosing Petroleum Engineering was knowing that to advance in a petroleum career, he would have to leave Montana.

“You kind of knew there weren’t many opportunities in Montana,” he said, “So Tech Petroleum alumni get scattered all over. But the fact is that nearly 50 percent of the petroleum engineers hired in the business over the past decade have come from this little school.”

He said the respect the Tech diploma carries is terrific.

“Tech graduates come prepared to work pretty hard,” he said. “And they do.”

When he graduated in 1984, Atlantic Richfield offered him a job on Alaska’s North Slope.

For Lance, who loves the outdoors, it was perfect. “I spent six years from Anchorage on the North Slope for Atlantic Richfield. It was the best job in the world. I thought I would never leave—I had all the toys, boats, snow machines, four-wheelers, three-wheelers, you name it.”

“They kept trying to move me, and I kept turning them down. Finally, one day they asked me where I might be interested in going if I absolutely had to work somewhere else. I mentioned Bakersfield, California, and the next day I had a note on my desk to see my supervisor. I was being transferred to Bakersfield.”

It worked out pretty well for him. He met his wife, Lisa, there, and got married.

They began to travel—a lot. Houston and Midland, Texas, Singapore, and another couple of stints in Anchorage.

During his third and final time in Alaska in 2000, British Petroleum bought Atlantic Richfield, so he suddenly became a BP employee. Because of antitrust concerns, the federal government stepped in and forced BP to divest itself of the Alaska assets it had taken over in the Atlantic Richfield deal. So they were sold to Phillips Petroleum.

Then, in 2002, Phillips merged with Conoco, creating ConocoPhillips.

By that time, Lance was stationed in Houston, running the lower 48 part of the company for Phillips.

Then, in 2011, citing a desire to create more shareholder value, the company spun off the “downstream” or refining part of the business, Phillips 66. ConocoPhillips then focused exclusively on the “upstream” part of the industry—exploring, developing, and producing crude oil and natural gas across the globe.

The following year, Lance was tapped to run ConocoPhillips.

It’s a challenging time for him and the company, coming out of COVID, with slowly improving commodity prices, increased regulatory pressure, and investor apathy toward the sector.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. It’s just a huge challenge. He sees demand for fossil fuels continuing to increase in the short and medium term until the 2030s, when he expects demand to decline slowly.

Now, Lance sees three imperatives for his company:

“First, we have to affordably and reliably meet the demands for transitional energy,” he said. “A billion people today don’t have access to affordable energy, and that is inhibiting development.”

“Secondly, our business has not done a good job providing adequate returns on and of capital. We’ve destroyed value. We are committed to provide significant returns to the shareholders.”

“And finally, we have to do it sustainably. To get to net zero emissions by 2050, we have put a plan in place. For the last couple of years, we have had a Paris-aligned climate risk strategy,” Lance said, adding that recent acquisitions made by the company “put us on a trajectory to cut our emissions intensity.”

Those acquisitions include Concho Resources, a pure-play Permian Basin shale production company, purchased for a total of $13 billion, and Shell Oil’s Permian Basin assets, purchased for $9.5 billion. The two deals make ConocoPhillips a huge Permian Basin player, which was previously a hole in its portfolio. The Permian is one of the lowest cost-of-supply basins in the world, and also among the lowest in greenhouse-gas emission intensity.

“Montana Tech students benefit daily from the contributions of Ryan and his wife Lisa,” said Tech’s Les Cook. “They were instrumental to completion of the Living & Learning Center and have regularly contributed to the Annual Fund, the Petroleum Department, the Digger Turf project, and student scholarships. In addition to being a major donor, Ryan’s leadership and passion for Montana Tech as a former member of the Foundation Board of Directors was instrumental in the successful fundraising and completion of the Natural Resources Research Center. It’s fair to say that all Montana Tech students are better prepared for the future through the Lance family’s leadership and generosity.”

Lance has been involved in other ways as well.

“I brought Governor Bullock and Clay Christian (the Montana University System’s Commissioner of Higher Education) down here (to Houston) to help them understand the special place Montana Tech occupies in our industry. I hope I gave them an appreciation for what the school has done for the industry.”

He also lobbied them to do exactly what was ultimately done—to take Tech out from under the umbrella of the University of Montana, and make it a standalone, special-focus institution.

“It had to be done,” he said. “Being under the University of Montana was untenable.”

He said the school “has to continue to build our research and doctoral programs, to build on the special formula Tech has to continue to grow.”

He said that he and his wife would continue to play a significant role in Tech’s future.

“We’re not done giving back to the school. There are more things we hope to do. We want to be consistent with Les’s vision for the school and where he wants to take it over the next five to ten years. We are waiting to understand and figure out where we can help faster and quicker. We want to make sure that Tech preserves its special place in the State and within our industry and other industries,” he said.

Lance said his continuing involvement with his beloved alma mater was a given.

2020 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARDEES

Montana Technological University honored three alumni with the 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award at a ceremony on Friday evening, September 24. The 2020 Distinguished Alumni are Kendell V. Tholstrom, James Fraser, and James Tangaro.

The Distinguished Alumni Award is presented to alumni of Montana Tech, who established a professional career of at least 20 years, of which 5 years have been in a responsible capacity, and who has either contributed outstandingly to the furtherance of his or her profession and/or has been an outstanding contributor to Montana Tech.

Kendell V. Tholstrom ’68, ’71

Kendell (Ken) V. Tholstrom spent 42 years in the petroleum industry in various engineering and management positions with Getty Oil Company, ARCO, and Terra Resources. He was the V.P. and General Manager of Presidio Oil Company for 10 years in Denver, and cofounder and V.P. of American Oil and Gas Company in Denver until it sold to Hess Corporation in 2010.

Ken graduated from Anaconda High School in 1963, where he was student body president and co-captain of the football team. While at Tech, he was the junior class president and named an All-Conference football player for 4 years. Ken is a member of the Montana Tech Athletic Hall of Fame. He is a great supporter of the university. He has served on the Petroleum Department’s Advisory Board, the Montana Tech Foundation Board, and established the Tholstrom Family Endowed Scholarship for Anaconda High School studentathletes. Ken and his wife Claudia Samuelson are retired and live near Park City, UT. They have 8 children, 31 grandchildren, and 1 great-grandson.

James Fraser ’75

Jim has over 40 years of significant upstream experience across the USA and Canada. Jim began his professional career with Marathon Oil Company. He worked for several public companies, most notably over 20 years with Burlington Resources in various management, exploration, operations, and engineering roles, and key successful exploration programs. He was V.P. of Operations for Chesapeake Energy’s Southern Division. Following his time at Chesapeake, he was Senior Vice President of Talisman Inc.’s North American Shale Division. Jim turned to the private sector in 2012, starting his own consulting company working on shale projects across North America, South America, and Europe before becoming co-founder, CEO, and President of private equity-backed RimRock Oil and Gas in 2016. Starting with an entrepreneurial spirit and from ground zero, the RimRock team operates in North Dakota with a corporate office in Denver. Jim and his wife Amy have been generous in their support of Tech and Jim served on the Montana Tech Foundation Board. They have been married 38 years, and they have four grown children and eight grandchildren.

James Tangaro ’88

James Tangaro is the Refinery Manager for Marathon Petroleum Company’s refinery in Anacortes, Washington. He has 32 years of experience in the petroleum industry, progressing through many assignments that led him to manage refineries for the past 9 years. Before the Anacortes assignment, James was the Vice President of the Kenai Refinery, and Director of Business Operations for three refineries and marketing areas. He spent 14 years at a Salt Lake City refinery, where he was an engineer, the Environmental Health and Safety Manager, and the Operations Manager. James grew up in Butte, Montana, and attended Butte High School and Montana Tech. James married Michele (Riley) Tangaro 35 years ago as she was earning a degree in Accounting from Montana Tech. After they graduated in May 1988, they moved to Lafayette, LA, to start their careers. They have moved seven times since then, but Butte will always be home. James and Michele have been generous in their support of Tech by providing opportunities for local students. They have two daughters, Rachel and Ashley, ages 34 and 30.