Technical Team
All the Company’s exploration activities, including surveying, geophysical and reservoir modeling, field development planning and well targeting are planned, managed and reviewed by a  technical team led by US Oil Exploration Director Karim Akrawi.  Further expertise is provided by additional consultants.

The US Oil & Gas Core Technical Team is as follows:

Soran Talabani, Petroleum engineer/Drilling manager:
Soran has over 30 years of international experience in various aspects of the oil industry: Well Logging, Drilling, Drilling Fluids, Cementing, and Reservoir and Environmental Engineering. Soran earned his MSc and PhD degrees in Petroleum Engineering from New Mexico Institute of Technology.  Dr. Talabani is a specialist in Real Time Operation Center (RTOC), and Drilling and Formation Evaluation.  He has published and presented over 40 research papers and reports.

Robert B. Langston, Well testing/Completions/Production:
Robert is a production, drilling, completions and project engineering manager with almost 40 years industry experience. He has worked in Texas, California, New Mexico, Louisiana, and offshore US, as well as in Venezuela, Guatemala, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Russia. His expertise encompasses field optimisation, field development planning, completions engineering, workovers, production, subsea well intervention and reserves estimation.

After his Petroleum Engineering degree from Texas Tech University, amongst other appointments Robert was Senior Reservoir and Lead Production Engineer with Mobil Oil (1981-1990), was Drilling, Production, and Engineering Manager for various independents from 1990 to 1996, and held senior posts at Schlumberger from 1996 to 2019, including: Senior Workover and Completion Engineer, Well Services Manager, Field Production Manager, Project Manager Field Optimization Studies, Engineering Manager, and Principal Deepwater SubSea Project Manager. Robert is currently an independent consultant specialising in completions, workovers, production, and well testing, both onshore and offshore.

David Richers, Geologist /Geochemist:
David has worked for over 30 years in the oil industry, including scientific roles in Marathon International Oil Company, Westinghouse Savannah River Company, and as an Independent Consulting Geologist with EnCana Oil and Gas.  He specializes in remote sensing and geochemical prospecting, correlation studies and numerical basin modelling and has worked extensively in Nevada.   His BS in geology is from Penn State, his MS in Geochemistry and his PhD in geology and geochemistry is from Univ. of Kentucky.

Sezai Ucan, Reservoir engineer
Sezai holds an M.Sc. In Petroleum Engineering from University of Texas and and a Ph.D. from University of Oklahoma. He specialises in Prospect Evaluation, Integrated Reservoir Characterization and Simulation, Reservoir Management, and Data Analytics for Conventional and Unconventional Fields. As Reservoir engineer he has worked for Libertad Energia (Argentina); YPF S.A.; Tecpetrol and PDVSA (Venezuela). He has particular expertise in evaluating prospects and reservoirs in volcanics.

Sezai is the author of numerous technical papers and is currently the Associate Editor for the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE)Productions and Operations and has been a member of the SPE’s Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering Editorial Review Committee. He is also Associate Editor for Journal of Petroleum Exploration and Production Technology & Engineering.
He is a Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), and the Society of Exploration Geophysics (SEG).

Jerzi Maciolek, Project Explorationist / Geophysicist
Jerzi has extensive experience of oil exploration in Nevada’s productive Railroad Valley and with all phases of data collection and interpretation of geology, geophysics and geochemistry (GGG). He specialises in integrating GGG data into new exploration models leading to the development of new hydrocarbon plays. He was for eight years a Senior Research Geophysicist with Gulf Oil working on petroleum System models in the Basin and Range Provinces of the United States . He worked in both oil and mineral exploration in over 15 Nevada valleys (Yates Petroleum,, Santa Fe Gold and ETI). He has successfully explored for oil and gas in Poland and the Ukraine, and was vice-president of exploration at FX Energy from 1995 to 2016, during which time he established new prolific and commercial hydrocarbon plays.

Jerzi specialises in the structural and stratigraphic interpretation of seismic data, the application of organic and inorganic chemistry, and developing petroleum system models and hydrocarbon plays. He has actively led every phase of exploration – the design of 2D/3D seismic surveys, field data collection, processing (PSTM, PSDM, AVO), interpretations, depthing, and the location of drilling prospects. Jerzi holds an Msc. in Seismic Exploration from the Mining and Metallurgy Academy, Krakow, Poland.

 

ADDITIONAL CONSULTING

Baker Hughes Inc.
Baker Hughes is one of the largest oilfield services companies in the world.

Forrest A. Garb & Associates Inc (FGA):
FGA is a consulting firm comprised of professional petroleum engineers, geologists, and technical support personnel with diversified backgrounds in all phases of the petroleum, energy, and minerals industries. The group prides itself in offering the highest level of ethics, state of the art technology, and prompt dedicated service to its clients.

Saad Saleh, Sr. Drilling Engineer:
Senior Drilling Engineer with 26 years of professional experience focused on drilling operations (land, HPHT, deep water), drilling training and mentoring, as well as major high profile oil and gas fields technology projects.  Recent projects include real time pore pressure and wellbore stability prediction on the world’s most challenging ultra deep water prospects from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, developing real time drilling intelligence tools, subsalt deepwater drilling practices, wellbore stability studies/best practices, and mentoring/training drilling engineers with major operators. In addition, Dr. Saleh has expertise in many aspects of Petroleum Engineering including well productivity enhancement, completion and recompletion economics and diagnostics, as well as reservoir analysis.  Saad has a PhD in Petroleum Engineering, Colorado School of Mines (USA), 1988.

Ahmad Abdul Ghani, Geologist:
Ahmad is a Senior Reservoir Geologist with over 38 years of experience in the Middle East region.  He was Senior Sedimentologist with ELF (currently TOTAL), Head of Dept of Geology, South Oil Company – Iraq, and Senior Staff Geologist, ADCO, UAE. He has authored and coauthored many papers (AAPG, SPE). Participated in most of the exploration, appraisal and development studies on giant fields (Majnoon, Halfaya, Nahr Umr, Zubair & Rumaila, Bab, Bu Hasa) in the Middle East.

Izhr Ul Haq, Physicist:
Izhr has fifteen years experience in managing simulation and modeling teams.  He has lectured at the New York Institute of Technology, Al Gurair University and Al-Ain College.  He established Computational Modeling Laboratory as a research and development organization in Abu Dhabi.