“Everything we do now, we think about the environmental aspect of it,” says Northeastern graduate and Running Foxes CEO Steve Tedesco
Steve Tedesco has been the president and CEO of Running Foxes Petroleum for close to 30 years. And he credits his Northeastern University education with helping him pursue that career path.
A 1977 graduate, Tedesco arrived at the university as a chemistry major before stumbling into earth science after taking a course on the geology of North America.
“I had always thought geology was about weather,” he says. “But after that, I stuck with geology and did very well.”
That eventually led to a business plan.
When he founded Running Foxes Petroleum in 1998, the idea was to offer an alternative for investors looking to locate oil and gas — different from methods used by big oil companies like Exxon.
Tedesco’s company determines potential drilling locations based on surface geochemistry data and other techniques, then partners with investors to drill at those locations. Its customers are local oil and gas purchasing companies.
“We’re at the low end of production, a couple hundred barrels of oil a day,” he says. “It’s enough to make a good living.”
Today, the company has operations in seven states in the Western U.S. and has expanded to include wind, solar, helium, hydrogen, lithium and disturbed power projects. One of Tedesco’s biggest goals of late is working on being more environmentally conscious.
“Forty or 50 years ago, no one in the oil and gas industry worried about an oil spill,” he says. “They’d clean it up occasionally. Now what the industry is doing is trying to address all of the environmental issues that are being raised. Everything we do now, we think about the environmental aspect of it.”
A recent project he is excited about is the development of a combination helium and oil and gas project in Cisco, Utah. Helium has become a major resource in the oil and gas industry, he highlights.
“Helium is very hot right now,” he says. “Helium atmospheres are where they grow the chips. Helium is critical to a lot of high tech, cryogenics and medical devices. Its price is basically 200 times what natural gas prices are. … It’s a very lucrative market when you find it.”
Wind and solar are also major areas of investment for the company, though they do come with their own environmental issues, he says.
After graduating from Northeastern, Tedesco went on to earn his master’s degree before working in the mobile minerals division of Mobil Oil in Denver. After spending a year there, he returned to Boston before relocating permanently to Colorado. He has since earned his doctorate in geology.
Running Foxes Petroleum does business mostly in the central and western states.
“I’ve been focused basically in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado and Utah for the past 30 years,” he says. “A lot of my partners are from Europe and China, so I have a diverse group of people backing me up.”
At 70, Tedesco is winding down. Looking back on his career, Tesdesco has few regrets. One of his proudest accomplishments is helping train future generations.
“I’ve trained a lot of people who went on to work for bigger companies,” he says. “We became a source of young geologists. We trained them for two years, and then they got a better job elsewhere. … One of my focuses is to have good quality people, technically competent in geology, and it worked out very well.”