George Keller 1923-2008

Original: George Keller 1923-2008

George Keller, the former Chevron chairman, who died yesterday in Palo Alto, was an archetype of the intuitive, gambling, technologically driven men who formerly made up the spine of the oil industry. It's not sentimentality to say that one of Big Oil's biggest problems is that today there are none like him at the helm of the five or six top companies.

Keller is famous for the nervy play that created Chevron -- the 1984 purchase of legendary Gulf Oil, described vividly in Daniel Yergin's The Prize. But Keller's vision didn't et="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramco">pioneering of Saudi Arabian oil. And he told me about the day in 1987 when he got a call from his much-trusted investment banker, Nicholas Brady, about a fellow named Jim Giffen who had an interesting concept. Keller should give Giffen a hearing, Brady said.

A few days later, Giffen -- a little-known New York promoter of business in the Soviet Union -- arrived in Keller's office. He proceeded to describe to the Chevron boss and his lieutenants how they might acquire an oilfieild in the off-limits Soviet Union -- what Ronald Reagan at the time called the Evil Empire.

Few oilmen would have trusted a fellow like Giffen, who belonged to a class of businessmen -- middlemen -- who usually earned their money by getting between oilmen and the oilfield. But Keller did. He ordered his men to go with Giffen to Moscow. And so b