Raymond Plank

Raymond Plank (born May 29, 1922) is the founder and retired Chairman of Apache Corporation. He led Apache from a small oil and gas concern to a conglomerate with interests in energy, commercial real estate, agriculture, manufacturing and telecommunications, then divested its non-energy assets to concentrate exclusively on oil and gas exploration and production. Under Plank’s leadership Apache expanded its oil and gas operations internationally and built the company from its original $250,000 capitalization to a market capitalization of over $30 billion. Plank invented the Master Limited Partnership and made it a personal and company mission to expose corruption at Enron and within the energy merchant trading sector.

Raymond Plank, the youngest of four siblings, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to farmer and coal miner Raby Plank and Maude Ruth Howe Plank. His parents’ schooling was limited but they instilled in their children the value of education, and Plank dedicated himself to a lifetime of learning. His mother died of a blood clot after a routine appendectomy when Plank was fifteen.

Plank attended the Blake School in Minneapolis and credits his Latin instructor Noah Foss and other Blake teachers with providing the educational basis and academic discipline necessary for a successful life. Plank entered Yale University in September 1940 and after Pearl Harbor enlisted in the Army Air Corps Reserves. He was called to active duty in March 1943 and would not resume his university education until the end of the war. Plank graduated from Yale University in 1946 with a bachelor of arts degree.

After flight school, Plank was assigned to the 43rd Bomb Group, 64th Bomb Squadron, in the Pacific Theater of Operations as a B-24 bomber pilot. He completed 40 missions; three of his aircraft were so badly damaged in combat that they never flew again. On August 9, 1945, while based in the Okinawas, Plank took an unauthorized check flight to witness the mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki.

Upon graduation from Yale, Plank returned to his hometown of Minneapolis and with two partners formed Northwest Business Service, an accounting, tax and small business advisory firm. Through this enterprise, he became familiar with the types of investments then being offered in oil and gas exploration and production. Recognizing that investors’ interests in this field could be better served through a different concept, Plank and two childhood friends, Truman Anderson and Chuck Aranao, formed Apache Corporation in 1954 with $250,000 in investor capital. Apache offered its first oil and gas investment program in 1956. Apache initially diversified beyond oil and gas into commercial real estate, purchasing office towers and shopping centers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Apache’s real estate business achieved only minimal success, and when Oklahoma and Texas cut oil production allowables by as much as 90 percent in the late 1950s, the company sold off its real estate holdings and began acquiring successful entrepreneurial businesses including small telephone companies, an auto parts chain, the tree crop business and aerosol can and plastic pipe companies. Conflict in the Middle East, the rise of OPEC and America’s increasing dependence on foreign oil led Plank to revise Apache’s strategy once again in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The company gradually divested its non-energy holdings and by the late 1980s was focused exclusively on oil and gas. Apache funded much of its early growth through the creation of drilling funds, investment programs that provided significant tax advantages to unit holders. To provide its unit holders greater liquidity, in 1971 Apache formed Apache Exploration Company (Apexco) as the oil and gas operating arm of its drilling programs. Apexco was innovative in that it provided the first-ever vehicle for program participants to exchange their illiquid units for publicly traded stock. In 1981, under Plank’s leadership, Apache created Apache Petroleum Company (APC), the nation’s first master limited partnership (MLP). This new investment vehicle consolidated interests in 33 Apache oil and gas programs formed between 1959 and 1978. APC units were traded on the New York and Midwest Stock Exchanges, providing liquidity to unit holders while preserving the tax advantages of their original limited partnership interests.

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