Bill Transier: The Texas oilman who has a striking British reserve

A Day in the Life: Basketball may put the bounce in Endeavour International's chief, but he's a sport, not a brash business bore

5am

At 53, Bill Transier keeps up the sort of pace that would exhaust most people half his age. The chief executive of North Sea oil exploration and production company Endeavour International grabs about five hours sleep a night but says: "I'm getting a bit older, so I need a bit more; when I was younger, I got by on three or four hours. I've never needed a lot."

After getting up, he puts the TV on to catch up on business and news. He also keeps an eye on the US, having a system called Slingbox installed that enables him to access and control his Houston cable connection when he is in London. It's particularly useful for US sports. Mr Transier is a former professional baseball player. He spent a couple of seasons with the evocatively named Corpus Christi Rattlers before heading for college and a business career. At the moment, he's monitoring the performance of his beloved Houston Rockets basketball team. He will then work out at a health club near his Kensington, west London, home.

8am

Mr Transier is usually the first at Endeavour's offices near Leicester Square, central London. He likes to get half an hour of quiet time before his colleagues arrive, poring over drilling reports and reading communications from Endeavour's offices in Houston, Aberdeen and Oslo. After briefing himself, he gathers together the comp-any's executive committee – the head of operations, the head of exploration, and finance director Mike Kirksey, to review business. "Our production is about 10,000 barrels of oil a day, about a third of which is as operator, and we plan to drill eight or nine wells in 2008. The second half of the year is going to be busy," he says drily.

Mr Transier has a rich Texan accent but he's rather more reserved than the clichéd image of the bombastic Texas oil man. "The committee is in charge of strategy and policymaking for the company and we spend an hour going over what's going on," he continues. The progress of those exploration wells is likely to be watched closely in Westminster as well as the City (Endeavour has a full listing on the London Stock Exchange). Gordon Brown has just announced plans to step up production in the North Sea, where there are still an estimated 25 billion barrels of oil and gas to be extracted, in an effort to ease the pressure of sky-high energy bills on the "hard-working families" who have given him a recent electoral kicking.

9.30am

Mr Transier has a meeting with his "Capital Allocation Committee", which decides how Endeavour should spend its money. "If we are drilling a well or making an acquisition, we will have a pres- entation from someone who has done the work. We'll spend between $90m and $100m this year and need to be sure we are making the right choices," he says.

Around two-thirds of Endeavour's business is in the UK North Sea, although the most recent discovery – announced just over a week ago – came from the Norwegian part. However, despite the excitement generated by Mr Brown's announcement, Endeavour is beginning to think about deploying its capital elsewhere. "We have cash flow of about $150m this year and we will be opportunity driven. The difficultly for us with the North Sea is that there is a long time between spending capital [exploring and developing wells] and making capital [from the oil]. That makes it a big risk. You might have production problems, a fall in the oil price, or the banks might start seizing up," he says, referring to the credit crunch which has made life difficult for exploration companies despite the windfall those that are actually producing oil (like Endeavour) have been getting from the sky-high oil price. "If we do look outside the North Sea, it will be somewhere where that time is shorter."

Mr Transier believes the Government could help by easing the tax burden on companies like his. "We pay 50 per cent and were excluded from a cut in corporation tax last year. That had a negative impact on the thinking of energy companies in the North Sea and how they allocate resources. We reinvest all our capital and anything that improves the flow of capital that we could put back to work would help."

12.30pm

"It's a rare day when I'm not having lunch with an investor, current or prospective, or a director, or a partner," says Mr Transier, who eats out "90 per cent of the time", hence the early gym sessions. Today, he's sitting down with Peter Smedvig, the financier, who has pumped $100m into Endeavour in the form of a convertible bond which, if all goes well, should become a substantial equity stake. "They picked us to be their North Sea exploration and production investment. So far, we've allocated $40m and I sit down with him every couple of months and talk about how that investment is going."

2pm

The analysts believe that there will be an M&A boom in the North Sea as the 160 or so companies hunting those 25 billion barrels realise they would be better off joining forces. Mr Transier regularly sits down his bankers, Goldman Sachs and Lambert Energy, to discuss opportunities to do deals, with the latter in today.

The meeting finishes at 3pm when the US is open for business, sparking calls between Mr Transier and investors. Endeavour might be listed in London but 85 per cent of its shareholders remain in the US. "We are trying to move that to the UK. Investors on the LSE and in Oslo understand the North Sea better than US investors and give more credit in terms of valuation multiples," he says. "That was why we moved our listing to the main board of the LSE." The other reasons? The Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance reforms in the US. "It doubled our accounting and audit fees. We pay a lot of money to show we are doing something we were already doing."

6pm

After another strategy meeting, Mr Transier heads for home to freshen up for dinner, where he will meet a potential merger candidate at Mark's, a dining club located just off Berkeley Square. "I'm a member and I like it because it's quiet – they know me." He will arrive home at 10pm, and go through the next day's schedule and deal with emails. He won't turn in until midnight, or later. "I watch a lot of sport. Slingbox means I can catch games. I'm sometimes up until the small hours watching baseball."

The CV

Name: Bill Transier.

Age: 53.

Marital Status: Divorced, with two grown-up children.

Education: Regis University, MBA; University of Texas, BBA.

Career: 2006-present: President, chairman and chief executive of Endeavour International.

2003-2006: Co-founded NSNV.

1999-2003: Executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Ocean Energy.

1996-1999: Vice-president and chief financial officer of Seagull Energy.

Started career with KPMG. Played two years' professional baseball with the Corpus Christi Rattlers.