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HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES
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Joseph Badyk, 1989
Joe Badyk was born in Saskatoon in 1925 where he attended Bedford Road Collegiate. He later attended St. Peters College in Muenster, SK before serving in the Canadian Army in World War II.
Joe started his business career with Canadian Pacific Hotels in Calgary, Banff, and Lake Louise. He entered the oil industry in 1951 with Canada Cities Service Petroleum Ltd. serving in financial and administrative positions and as a Director of the corporation. Mr. Badyk left Cities Service in 1966 to form Prudential Steel Ltd. and in 1989 was Chairman of the Board for that corporation.
Joe has held key positions in numerous community associations in the Calgary area. He was the Chairman of the United Way, Past President of the Calgary Petroleum Club, a Past Chairman of Camp Cadicasu (a boy’s and girls’ summer camp), and a Past President of the Junior High Hockey League in which he had served fourteen years.
For over 40 years, Joe had served in and contributed to, the oil and gas industry throughout western Canada.
Art Dumont, 2011
Art Dumont was born and raised in Kennedy, Saskatchewan. Graduating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1967 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, he soon made his mark on the oil and gas industry. Art began his career with Gulf Canada Resources Ltd. where he held a range of engineering-related positions. In 1975, he became the Canadian Vice President and General Manager of Bawden Drilling.
By 1985, he had risen to become that company’s Senior Vice President of Operations, responsible for all the companies operations in Canada, Texas, California, the UK, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Madagascar, and Peru.
Through the 1990s, Al shared his talents with a number of companies. By 2000, he had served as President of Cactus Drilling in Texas; President of Kenting Energy Services Ltd.; Chief Operating Officer for Precision Drilling Corporation; President and CEO for Rock Bit Company Ltd.; and President and CEO of Cen Alta Energy Services Inc.
Through most of the 2000s, he served as Chairman and CEO of Technical, a company for whom he still provided consulting services in 2011.
Art has also been the director of many organizations and holds numerous professional memberships.
He was the C.J. Mackenzie Distinguished Graduate Lecturer in 1998 and has received awards from the Canadian Society of Exploration Geologists for Best Paper of the Year (1975) and the International Association of Drilling Contractors for Dedicated and Outstanding Service.
Art was also a patron of the arts and served as the chairman of the Holmans International Piano Competition for several years.
He was also an active supporter of the University of Saskatchewan. He was appointed to the board in 2003 and served as board chair from 2006 to June 2010. In 2011, he was a member of the finance and investments committee and served as chair of the governance and executive committee.
Rick McHardy, 2017
Art Dumont, 2011
Rick McHardy was born in Oshawa, Ontario but moved with his family to Saskatoon at the age of nine. “My dad was a professional engineer who worked for DuPont. When I was nine, he decided he wanted to make a dramatic career change. He got a job in Saskatchewan with the corrections service training prisoners to make furniture. Of course, at the time as a kid, I thought my life was ruined. But then you make new friends and move on,” Rick says. Rick attended the University of Saskatchewan from which he graduated with degrees in commerce and law. “At that time in the 1990s, there weren’t a lot of jobs for young lawyers in Saskatchewan so, like a lot of young people at the time, I headed to Calgary.” Rick practiced corporate and securities law in Calgary until 2004, most recently as a Partner with McCarthy Tetrault LLP.
While Rick’s educational background did not prepare him for the oil and gas industry, junior oil and gas companies made up much of his client base in Calgary. His legal career got him into oil industry boardrooms at a young age and allowed him to learn from “the best of the best”. Like his father before him, Rick started to look for a career change and the oil and gas industry was a natural fit. In 2004, he left his practice to found Titan Exploration Ltd. which was focused on the Shaunavon play in southwest Sask. Titan’s production grew from zero to approximately 2,300 barrels/day before the company was sold to Canetic in 2008.
Rick started two other companies – Spartan Exploration Ltd. and Spartan Oil Corp. that followed this same cycle that Rick calls “zero to five and out” – building up assets in a junior oil company with an eye to flipping them to a larger one. “The cycle in the industry was changing with everything getting bigger – bigger deals, bigger companies and we followed that trend.” In 2013, Rick started Spartan Energy Corp. While most other companies were preoccupied with the Bakken play, Spartan Energy Identified an opportunity to consolidate and develop assets in the conventional Mississippian fairway in southeast Saskatchewan, an older field where drilling dated back to the 1950s and 1960s. Spartan Energy initially grew production through drilling and a few acquisitions which brought the company to around 9,300 barrels/day in early 2016. Then, the industry was sent reeling by the downturn in oil prices.
Spartan Energy was able to take advantage of the downturn through an aggressive round of acquisitions that dramatically increased its assets. Today, the company that began as a $25 million start-up has grown to produce 21,000 barrels/day, to hold a land base of 376,000 acres, and to have a market capitalization of $1.4 billion. Despite the downturn in the industry, Rick says that Spartan is “the best company we’ve ever been.” “We are generating positive cash flow at $40 a barrel, so anything north of that puts us in good shape.” Outside of work, Rick and his wife have two teenage boys. A lot of his spare time is taken up watching his older son play junior hockey in Camrose. Rick and his wife also enjoy traveling and spending time at their cabin in Vernon.
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