Two‑Track Growth: High‑Graded Prospects + Strategic Acquisitions

There’s a particular kind of frustration that only people in this business understand. You know where the oil is. You’ve done the geology. You’ve mapped the play. You’ve got prospects lined up that you’re confident in. And you can’t drill any of them because nobody will give you the money.

Robert Wichert described it on Wisdom at the Wellhead in a way that I think a lot of people in oil and gas felt in their gut. Our industry has been in the gutters since 2016 when oil prices crashed. Multiple events globally have shunned people away from oil. For the past six years, raising money has been almost impossible.

Six years. Think about that. Six years of play generators with thirty, forty years of experience sitting on stacked prospects they couldn’t drill. Six years of small operators watching wells decline because they couldn’t afford a rod job, let alone a recompletion. Six years of proven geology collecting dust because the capital wasn’t there.

And now the money is coming back.

So what do you do when six years of pent-up opportunity meets returning capital? You don’t pick one track. You run two.

Track One: The Prospects That Have Been Waiting

Robert’s first track at Cougar Energy is internal prospects. And what’s interesting is where those prospects come from. They’re largely coming from play generators who have been doing this for thirty, forty years but couldn’t raise any money. So the work kept getting done. The geology kept getting mapped. The prospects kept getting stacked up. But nobody could fund the drill bit.

Now Cougar comes in and the job is to high-grade those prospects. Sort through what’s been piling up. Figure out which ones are ready, which ones need more work, and which ones deserve capital today. That’s a different kind of problem than most companies face. Most operators are out there trying to find prospects. Robert is trying to prioritize the ones that have been waiting in line.

I’ve always believed there’s more opportunity sitting in existing knowledge than most people realize. We spent so many years in this industry where good ideas and good geology couldn’t get funded, and the people who held that knowledge just kept working, kept refining, kept waiting. Now somebody shows up with capital and connected systems and says, “let’s go.” That’s a powerful position to be in.

Track Two: Strategic Acquisitions at the Right Time

The second track is acquisitions, and Robert is specific about what he’s looking for. Producing properties. Exploration plays that are right at the drilling point. Not projects that need five more years of work. Properties where the upside is clear and the path to first production is short.

And the timing matters. Robert said this is a very exciting time to make acquisitions. When capital has been absent from the industry for six years, the people selling are often the ones who’ve been hanging on by their fingernails. The prices reflect that. The assets are real. The sellers are motivated. And if you’ve done your homework on integration and automation, you can absorb those properties into your operating model without doubling your headcount.

I agree with Robert on this. The slowdowns that have occurred in this industry create future opportunities. Huge ones. On many, many levels. The companies that come out of a downturn with cash and a plan are the ones that get to pick up the pieces that other people couldn’t hold onto. That’s not taking advantage of anyone. That’s how cycles work. And the operators who are ready for the upswing are the ones who planned during the down.

Why Both, Not One or the Other

Most companies pick a lane. You’re either a driller or an acquirer. You’re either building from scratch or buying what somebody else built. And there are good reasons for that. Focus matters. Resources are limited. You can’t chase everything.

But Robert’s argument, and I think he’s right, is that the two tracks actually feed each other. The internal prospects give you a pipeline of known-quality opportunities in areas where you’ve done the work. The acquisitions give you production, cash flow, and footprint that accelerate your ability to drill those internal prospects. One track keeps the engine running while the other one builds the future.

And here’s the part that ties it all together. Because Cougar built its data systems and automation before it started operating, both tracks run on the same backbone. An acquisition doesn’t mean standing up a whole new set of systems. It means plugging that property into the same engineering, accounting, and field monitoring platform everything else runs on. That’s what makes two tracks manageable instead of chaotic.

I’ve watched companies try to grow on two fronts without that kind of backbone, and it usually ends with people drowning in data they can’t reconcile and operations they can’t keep up with. The difference is whether you built the foundation first or whether you’re trying to pour it while the building is already going up. Robert poured it first. That’s why he can run two tracks without losing control.

A Broader Map Than Most Startups Would Attempt

What makes Cougar’s two-track strategy even more ambitious is the geography. Robert isn’t just looking at Texas and Louisiana, though that’s where the near-term focus is. He’s got international opportunities lined up in Latin America and Africa. That’s a big spread for a startup, and most people in the industry would tell you it’s too much. But Robert has forty-two years of upstream experience and he’s spent years planning this before executing any of it. He’s not winging it. He’s deploying against a map he’s been drawing for a long time.

Jeff Dyk, host of Wisdom at the Wellhead, asked Robert on the podcast what he’d done to stack the opportunities and start feeding the engine. Robert’s answer was all planning. He’d spent the years since selling his last company laying out how this would work, looking at the regions, understanding Total Stream’s full-cycle capacity, figuring out what else needed to connect to it. By the time capital showed up, the plan was already built. All that was left was execution.

Final Thought

Downturns don’t just destroy value. They store it. They compress opportunity into a smaller and smaller space, and the longer the downturn lasts, the more gets packed in there. Six years of good geology that couldn’t get funded. Six years of producing properties that couldn’t get maintained. Six years of experienced people who couldn’t find backing.

The operators who planned during that time, who built their systems and sharpened their strategy while everyone else was just trying to survive, are the ones who get to unlock all of that stored value when the capital comes back.

Robert Wichert planned. And now it’s go time.

Capital is returning to oil and gas, and Cougar Energy is ready to move on two fronts. Hear Robert Wichert explain how decades of experience and years of planning come together in one company on Wisdom at the Wellhead.