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million. Heavey became president last year after more than three decades as general manager. It had been planned to stay with Tullow until 2019.
In paying tribute to Mr. Heavey on Wednesday, Paul McDade, chief executive of Tullow, described his predecessor as a pioneer.
"He founded Tullow 32 years ago as a small gas producer in Senegal and since Tullow has had operations in 45 countries around the world, including 20 countries in Africa," said Mr. McDade
Tullow is now recognized as Ireland's most successful exploration company, despite recent setbacks
A Co Roscommon accountant, Mr. Heavey created the oil and gas explorer after working for Tullow Engineering at Co Carlow.
Tullow focused on the purchase of assets that the biggest players were selling or in which they were selling. were not interested. It began with Senegal in Africa, where in the mid-1980s the World Bank sought an entity to manage certain gas-producing assets. From there, he moved to Bangladesh.
In 2001, he paid BP and Amoco GBP 201 million for oil wells in the North Sea. The turnover has been multiplied by nine to 125 million euros and the profits have risen to 36 million euros compared to 500,000 euros
Muscle
This has given Tullow strength to do more business. In 2004, it acquired Energy Africa, an operator with oil and gas exploration licenses in countries such as Egypt, Ghana, Mauritania, Morocco and Uganda.
Tullow discovered and exploited oil off the coast of Ghana. He then found a field in Uganda's Lake Albert Basin that could produce 200,000 barrels of oil a day.
He recruited the French giant Total and the Chinese player CNOCC to help develop this. Tullow is still developing Uganda while he is working on a new discovery in Kenya with the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels a day.
From the beginning, Tullow and Mr. Heavey focused on Africa. "He always felt that there were tremendous opportunities out there, not just in oil and gas but in business in general," says Job Langbroek, an analyst at Davy, a stockbroker. Dublin Securities
. He came to do business on the continent, because the people do not see this country as a former colonial power.
His own commercial instincts have driven him to look for opportunities. At the same time, he was hiring people with the technical skills to operate the goods he was buying.
"One of the unique aspects of Heavey was and remains the immense loyalty that Tullow's staff had towards him, even when" He always believed that if you had the right people around you, things would end up working out. "
Tullow led the way in terms of exploration in the margins of the Atlantic off Ghana, then in the Rift Valley, Uganda.
A move toward the geological "mirror" of Ghana off South America seemed to yield similar results, but was disappointing.
However, Tullow's decision to persist there and buy permits in Guyana off, its blocks lying near an area that, according to Exxon, could produce 4.5 billion barrels of oil.
The pioneering approach of Tullow saw his shares move from penny stock status to £ 15 in the London market.
His fate was reversed when the price of oil dropped from 60% four years ago to less than $ 40 a barrel at some point
. Staff cuts followed, though Tullow handled them without any bad blood.
million. Langbroek thinks he's now out of the woods, helped by a price recovery around $ 80 a barrel. "The debt has fallen to $ 3 billion and the goal is to reach $ 2.5 billion," he says.
The analyst believes that Tullow can live with this debt, which he says should naturally depreciate
the transition from Mr. Heavey to Mr. McDade as general manager s & # 39 is going well.
His successor as chairman, former Drax Group General Manager, Dorothy Thompson, is considered a strong figure.
It was known in the industry that Mr. Heavey did not want to leave the company that he had founded until it was in better shape, which, according to observers, has now been reached.
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