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Plank, a World War Two bomber pilot and graduate of Yale, began
as a bookkeeper and tax advisor in Minneapolis helping wealthy
investors with tax shelters in the oil and gas business.
Plank's son Roger said in an interview on Friday his father was
picked to run one operation after warning investors they were
being fleeced.
The company financed its drilling program through individual
partnerships, but Plank kept looking for ways to make the
financing more permanent, Roger Plank said. By 1981, he found a
law firm that helped fashion the first publicly-traded
partnership, a financing method that has gained wide use.
"He'd just noodle things until he could get them done," said
Roger Plank. The idea took off after Dow Chemical Co agreed in
1982 to sell Apache its U.S. oil exploration business for units
in the partnership, he said.
Plank also founded Ucross Foundation, an artist-in-residence
program on a 22,000-acre ranch in Ucross, Wyoming, that also was
stitched together from tax shelters, Roger Plank said.
The ranch is best known as the place where Annie Proulx partly
wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Shipping News."
Known for his colorful and sometimes profane descriptions of
rivals, Plank would tell investors that Apache was best at
exploiting assets that the oil majors abandoned.
"He described us as pigs following cows through the corn field,
picking up their leavings," said Tony Lentini, a former Apache
executive. "And behind us were the chickens."
Plank also was known for proposing "outlandish ideas to get
people thinking," said Lentini. In the 1980s Apache found oil in
the western desert of Egypt where there were no pipelines. Plank
got the government to start a truck network to move thousands
barrels per day to market until a pipeline could be built.
"We remember Raymond as a visionary leader and a strong,
passionate and caring man," said John J. Christmann, Apache's
chief executive. "His leadership, courage, generosity and
integrity are central to the core values he instilled at Apache,
and they continue to guide us today."
Plank is survived by six children, twelve grandchildren and
eleven great-grandchildren.
(Reporting by Gary McWilliams; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
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