What moves an old hand to change sides?

I always felt that being a venture capitalist is a privilege, more calling than career. Helping dedicated, well educated, mostly young people with turning their idea or technology into a successful company always was and remains a fascinating challenge to me.

Accessing the necessary capital to finance a new project always feels like the smallest hurdle. For me, looking for the right networking opportunities, finding the most suitable leadership team and especially developing the perfect business strategy have always been the most important factors in laying the cornerstone of a company with enduring success in the market.

I share this mindset with my closest friend Mario Windisch and this led us to join forces several years ago to found a small German venture capital company which focuses on supporting initiators around the globe with early stage projects in the energy sector. We weren’t interested in the energy inefficient “fashionable” investments such as biofuel plants, with all their associated negative effects, from endangering ecologically valuable regions (rain forests) to the extreme price rises in basic foodstuffs they cause. Instead we searched for technologies which enable a more efficient use of available resources and which have the potential for causing a paradigm shift in their respective markets.

Both of these criteria apply to GeoSpectra IPDS® which is the basis for RGR’s business model.

GeoSpectra IPDS® has been developed over the last 15 years by a team of scientist from various fields including physicists, mathematicians, geologists and geophysicists. Unlike old, established technologies such as reflection seismic, it enables the definitive identification of underground oil deposits.

This means a revolution in the search for oil!

Most of the large and easy to find oil reservoirs around the world were found decades ago. The effort required and complexity associated with finding new deposits today, even small ones, keeps rising. Diverting resources to offshore projects comes with huge costs and high risk. An inexpensive and “fast” technology that provides a scientifically founded, definitive prediction about the existence and volume of oil underground is a true breakthrough.

GeoSpectra IPDS® has impressively proven its effectiveness in the past years in a number of surveys around the globe. As close advisors to the project initiators we have followed these developments first hand.

This led us to rethink: we didn’t just want to be involved from the sidelines as advising venture capitalists, we wanted to directly profit from the enormous potential that GeoSpectra IPDS® offers, by actively utilizing GeoSpectra IPDS® in a market niche that up till now has not been filled.

The developer of GeoSpectra IPDS®, GeoDynamics Research S.r.l., sees itself as a service company, that offers its technology (which promises to become the standard tool for the oil industry in the near future) to big oil companies as aid in their search for large oil reserves in vast areas, neither the owners of small oilfields nor the exploration of oil deposits at their own expense are part of their focus.

This has enabled us to convince them to offer us their long-term support with the execution of our RGR business model.

At RGR we concentrate on finding new reservoirs directly in the most important market for oil, North America. Not offshore, with all the associated, unforeseeable risks and not by buying licenses for large unexplored areas but by partnering with lease holders whom we offer to deploy GeoSpectra IPDS® at our own expense on their currently producing or even abandoned oil fields. If the analysis proves positive, we invest in the exploitation of the deposits we find and expect a share of the income generated relative to the size of our investment.

As we can accurately predict the volume of oil underground before any drilling takes place and we always know the optimal drilling location, the risk usually associated with exploratory drilling is reduced to negligible. That lowers exploration costs and allows for profitable production from even the smallest reservoirs.

This makes RGR more than just another financial investor in domestic oil companies!

With us as partner, lease holders know before they begin drilling if and how much oil is underneath their fields, which means that the profitability of new investments can be accurately calculated and the risk reduced.

That is the reason this old hand decided to change sides!

Reinhard Tvarocska