Interview with 2008 SPE President William M. Cobb
Authors: Cobb William M. , Donnelly John 
Published: February 2015

William M. Cobb is president of William M. Cobb & Associates, a petroleum consulting firm based in Dallas that specializes in waterflooding, fluid injection, field studies, reserves evaluation and certification, and reservoir management. He founded the company in 1983. Before that, Cobb was vice president and manager of engineering for Cornell Oil in Dallas during 1979–83, and he was a staff research engineer and senior analytical and operations engineer for Atlantic Richfield. Cobb also taught reservoir engineering at Mississippi State University, where he now serves on the Dean's Development Council. He is currently an adjunct professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University.

Cobb was 2006 SPE Vice President-Finance and a member of the SPE Board of Directors. He has served on many SPE committees, including the Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition Program Committee, Editorial Review Committee, Distinguished Author Series Committee, Engineering Registration Committee, and several awards committees. Cobb chaired the board task force that recommended opening an SPE office in the Middle East and was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 1995. In 1999, he received the SPE Reservoir Engineering Award.

Cobb has served in numerous leadership positions at the section level, including Program Chairperson and General Chairperson for the SPE Hydrocarbon Economics and Evaluation Symposium sponsored by the SPE Dallas Section. In addition to publishing numerous technical papers, he has made more than 50 technical presentations to SPE sections throughout the world. Cobb earned BS and MS degrees from Mississippi State University and a PhD degree from Stanford University, all in petroleum engineering.

How do you see your role as SPE president? SPE is constantly pursuing a variety of worthwhile goals. As president, one serves for just 1 year, so it is difficult to establish new goals unless they are simple. I believe that the society needs to be guided by the Long-Range Plan, so my overriding objective will be to give direction to that plan and to see if we can begin to identify milestones to determine our progress. Several key initiatives tied to our Long-Range Plan come immediately to mind.

One is reserves. The work that the SPE Oil and Gas Reserves Committee has just finished is critically important, and I hope that over the next 12 to 18 months we can cause those reserves and resources definitions to be adopted universally by financial institutions, national oil companies, international oil companies, independents, consultants, and government institutions. It would delight me to no end to see the US Securities and Exchange Commission sign off on them. I think if companies and other entities that perform reserves evaluations will use these definitions, the accounting groups will follow and then we will have a very good chance of government agency approval as well.

Another important item will be the followup to the industry executive summit in June convened by 2007 SPE President Abdul-Jaleel Al-Khalifa. One outcome of that event was the idea to create a committee on carbon sequestration and have SPE take a leadership role on the carbon issue in the industry. That is something that the SPE Board of Directors and its appropriate committees will be discussing.