Hi and welcome to my page!

After graduating in Mechanical Engineering at Edinburgh University, my first job was with SLB as a Wireline Field Engineer. My time there exposed me to the full life cycle of operations on international drilling and workover rigs, both offshore platforms and on land locations. Hands-on expertise gained running numerous MDT's and PLT's was an invaluable apprenticeship which piqued my interest in the RE discipline.

I quit to complete a Masters in Petroleum Engineering before beginning a new career as a Reservoir Engineer with Enterprise Oil. This was a great opportunity to work in a multi-disciplinary team, on both operated and non-operated assets in UK North Sea and Russia. The company was eventually acquired by Shell, where I remained for 2 years before realizing that Big Oil was not for me.

I moved to Tullow Oil as a Senior RE, overseeing their Southern North Sea gas field portfolio, a great opportunity to add gas to my black oil experience. We developed several marginal assets, where I learned the importance of persistence and attention to detail.

In 2007 Tullow moved me to Cape Town to focus on W.Africa marginal developments. No sooner had I arrived than a key exploration well in Ghana found 110m pay, and the billion bbl Jubilee field was born! There followed an exciting period of appraisal and exploration drilling in Ghana and along the West Africa Transform Margin, with several discoveries over the next 3 years, while I simultaneously worked an extensive non-op mature asset portfolio (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Congo).

This period expanded my understanding of how the reservoir engineering discipline integrates into the exploration process, and allowed me to expand my team into a competent asset development group.

After coordinating operations on too many discoveries onshore Kenya during 2012-2014, I decided to take a second sabbatical, and enrolled at Stanford Business School for a Management degree - probably my best career decision to date since it greatly broadened my outlook, knowledge, and self-awareness. I followed this with an 18 month stint at a clean energy startup, honing transferrable skills while working directly with investors and utilities in a very different sector.

In 2017 I was invited to co-found Assala Energy to acquire Shell's Gabon subsidiary. Since then, we have grown Assala into one of West Africa's leading E&P's, producing over 50 mb/d with over 100% reserves replacement. As Subsurface Director I lead a team of over 30 Geoscientists to locate and recover the remaining oil across a mature onshore portfolio while applying cutting edge exploration geophysical techniques to find new fields. In this time we have drilled about 60 wells and completed nearly 200 workovers.

So what makes a great RE? In my opinion they possess sound knowledge of the fundamentals, are equally comfortable using the latest dynamic models or traditional non-simulation approaches, they code and compute with elegant script, present and write concisely and neatly, they are able to zoom in to the issues and zoom out to see the big commercial picture, and are hungry to learn about neighbor disciplines (especially geology, petrophysics, and process engineering).

Finally my career advice: don't be afraid to challenge yourself and take on new roles - that's the only way that you will learn and grow, even if it involves taking yourself outside of your comfort zone!