Never a dull moment for Denver oilman Tim Marquez.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: BUSINESS as usual

A LITTLE PAST 4:30 IN THE MORNING, MOST every morning, Tim Marquez starts his day in the pool, knocking out 3,500 meters. A few hours later he'll forego lunch in favor of a 7-to 8-mile run.

"It clears my head. It's meditative," says Marquez, 54, the chairman and CEO of Venoco Inc., a Denver-based oil and gas firm he co-founded in 1992. "When I'm running, I get to think about a lot of issues, and so when I come back to work I brainstorm a little. Plus, it makes you mentally tough. It's not just a physical thing."

One issue that no doubt has occupied Marquez's thoughts recently is his proposed buyback of publicly traded Venoco, which posted revenues of $329 million last year. Marquez already is the company's majority shareholder with 50.3 percent ownership, and on June 5, shareholders agreed to his buyout offer, proposed last August, of $12.50 per share, conditional to his ability to arrange financing. Venoco stock has traded in a 52-week range of $6.50 to $14.94 per share.

"We've said publicly that we think some of the parts are worth S40 a share, and yet the stock was trading at seven bucks a share last year," Marquez said in early June. "Clearly the investment community didn't share our enthusiasm. So I made a 60 percent premium offer at the time, and after nine months we're finally getting to the finish line. I do feel badly that some investors are not going to be able to see the upside, but we were in a tough position. The company certainly wasn't going to issue more shares at $7 per share to raise capital, and I wasn't going to sell any personally, so what was the point of being a public company?"

Marquez, the son of a high school biology teacher and high school English teacher, attended Denver's Abraham Lincoln High School and then the Colorado School of Mines where he earned a bachelor of science degree in petroleum engineering.

Although the School of Mines is widely hailed as the "Harvard of geosciences," Marquez says it was just dumb luck that he chose to attend it.

"One of the reasons I went to Mines is I didn't have much money when I was a kid, and at that time I think Mines was the cheapest school in the state," says Marquez, who in 2005 pledged $10 million toward a new petroleum engineering building for the school. "Tuition was $300 a semester. Even having grown up in Denver, like probably a lot of people you hear...