Pierre Sigonney is the Chief Economist of Total, and sits in the Corporate Strategy department. He is following the evolution of economic activity and the oil and gas markets in both the short term and the long term, on the upstream and downstream sides and their impact on Total strategy. Before he joined Total in 1999, he worked at the French Ministry of Finance, in the Treasure Department, following economic activity. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique France in 1981, and from ENSAE (Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique) in 1983. He achieved a Masters in International Economics and Finance from Paris Dauphine University (1983)

Tom Kovar began his career as a design engineer at the Chevron Chemical plant in Oak Point Louisiana in 1978. From there he went has also held various positions at the Pascagoula Refinery, the Richmond Refinery and the Philadelphia Refinery. When the Philadelphia Refinery was sold in 1994 he began his first international assignment as part of the technical Service team working for Chevron International Oil Co. assigned to the YPF La Plata, Argentina refinery. In 1997 he assumed the role of Production Operations Manager at the Tengiz Kazakhstan operation for Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc. In late 2000 he returned to the US as Technical Manager in Richmond before moving to Burnaby British Columbia Canada as VP Manufacturing and Supply for Chevron Canada Limited at the Burnaby refinery. Tom was assigned to initiate a technical service agreement with the Kuwait National Petroleum Co in Kuwait City Kuwait in 2004. In 2005 he left Kuwait and was assigned as interim Refinery manager at the Salt Lake Refinery. In late 2005 Tom assumed the role of Manager Strategy and planning for Global Refining in San Ramon until he was assigned to the position as General Manager Hawaii refinery in mid 2006. In January 2008, Tom assumed the role of General Manager of the Pembroke Refinery in the UK.

Mike is Head of Global Downstream Oil Consulting and a senior member of the Energy Consulting Team. He joined Wood Mackenzie in 1991 taking global responsibility for the development of the downstream oil consultancy practice and publications business. Since early 1997 his focus has been on developing the firm’s corporate/strategic consultancy business. Mike has led numerous consultancy assignments including industry/market studies and asset valuations, as well as providing strategic and transactional advice for companies such as AgipPetroli, Caltex, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, KPC, MOL, PDVSA, Petrogal, Petroplus, Preem, Sasol, Tesco, Texaco and Total. Prior to 1991 Mike was at BP where he held various positions in research, strategic and financial planning followed by four years commercial experience as a crude and then product trader. Mike has an honours degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University.

Per Olsson graduated in Chemical Engineering in 1974. After various other jobs he started his career in the Oil & Gas industry in 1981 as a process engineer at the BP Refinery in Gothenburg. He held various positions at this refinery and he also had a two year assignment for BP in London before he became Refinery Manager in 1992. The refinery was at that time owned by Preem. In 2001 he became Refinery Manager for the Preem refinery at Lysekil and in 2004 he became the manager for the two refineries. The two refineries are managed as a single operating unit. He is also responsible for the development of the refinery system. After 17 years as refinery manager he claims that the things he does not know about refining are not worth knowing.

Luis Tadeu Furlan, Energy Efficiency Petrobras Manager (GE-DEN/EFEN), Chemical Engineer graduated on Campinas State University, UNICAMP, 1985, Mastered in Chemical Engineering on UNICAMP – 1990, Ph.D. in isomers compounds separation by adsorption using simulated moving beds technology, on Politecnico di Milano, Italy 1994, Specialized in Environmental Management on UNICAMP and CETESB in 1998. He entered into Petrobras in 1987 and since then has developed many works in energy efficiency and environmental matters and is responsible for four Petrobras patents. He has coordinated and managed many research projects in environmental area together with Universities and is the author of many technical articles.

Tim Lloyd Wright runs an oil price discovery office in Europe for Oil Price Information Service and is European Editor of Hydrocarbon Processing magazine. Tim gained a Master of Arts (Journalism) from Goldsmiths College, London, and as a news, features and documentary journalist was commissioned by BBC Radio Four, The Observer, The Times, The Independent and The Guardian. In 1997, Tim joined Hart Publications as editor of European Fuels News and later served as Director, European Affairs for the company, as well as chairing the Brussels World Fuels Conference from 1999 to 2003. As a fuels industry reporter, Tim covered the key parliamentary sessions in Brussels and Strasbourg concerning the European Fuels Directive – one of Europe’s largest and most controversial bodies of EU rule-making. At the height of the UK refinery blockades, Tim was interviewed by the BBC’s Panorama news programme. For Hydrocarbon Processing magazine, Tim writes a Europe column and has been nominated for industry awards for his coverage of climate change and environmental issues. Tim has most contact on a day-to-day basis with the oil trading desks of Europe’s spot petroleum products market and he has direct responsibility for the OPIS Europe Jet Fuel and Gasoil Report. Tim lives in the oil shipping community of Donsö in the Gothenburg Archipelago in Sweden, where he enjoys sailing with his family and is chairman of a local climate change initiative.

Giacomo Rispoli holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Rome. He is Senior Vice President and Director of R&D at Eni Refining & Marketing Division. In this capacity, he is responsible for managing development and application of innovative process technology, catalyst and equipment covering all Eni’s technologies in refining and natural gas processing, either invented at Eni or acquired from third party. He is also responsible for application of the relevant health, safety and environmental legislation provisions. Prior to this, he was President and CEO of Eni’s Gela Refinery (Sicily) for three years (2004-2006). Previously, he had been Managing Director of Eni’s Venice Refinery. He joined Eni in 1986 and in 1990 he became responsible for the Technology and Control dept. of Taranto Refinery. Three years after he was entrusted with the management of the Infrastructure Project of AgipPetroli (now Eni’s Refining & Marketing Division) aimed at identifying changes to the existing refining system to make it suitable for matching the new oil industry scenario. From 1994 to 1996 he was responsible for Refining Operation Control with the duty of ensuring the optimal utilisation of plants of all Eni’s refineries, while managing refined petroleum product quality, through optimisation of blending and additive operation. In 1997 he became responsible for planning of oil refining operations. In 1999 he took responsibility for Supply and then for industrial operations of Agippetroli. In this capacity he was able to improve the ability of the industrial system to respond to international oil environment variations. He also significantly contributed to successful conclusion of fuel supply contracts with the Italian National Electricity Company.

Phil Brown graduated in Chemical Engineering from Loughborough University in 1976 and has worked for Foster Wheeler since 1985. During this time he has worked on many refinery projects in a variety of roles, including leading a number of process studies to evaluate optimum refinery configurations from both a technical and economic viewpoint. Phil has been heavily involved in activities associated with clean fuels, including development of methodologies for hydrogen and energy Management. He was Manager of Foster Wheeler's Refinery Group before becoming Director, Global Refining for Foster Wheeler.

Modesto Fernandez is currently the Cartagena Project Director for Repsol. He has a background as a Chemical Engineer, and has twenty five years experience in planning, process and project engineering as well as plant operations for the refining and petrochemical industry. He has worked for both Repsol and GE plastics

Mr BA-AMER was nominated as the General Manager of SAMIR and the President of SALAM GAZ Company that deals with LPG activities in 2004. Throughout his professional career course, Mr BA-AMER has successfully accomplished several important and complex projects. His most recent achievements are as follows: Rehabilitation works of SAMIR Mohammedia refinery after the flood and fire disaster that had affected all the installations and the units of the refinery; the budget of this operation was estimated to 150 Million US $, the modernization of the refining Industry of Morocco to introduce new technologies in order to keep up with the world of Refining, and also the Upgrading project of Mohammedia refinery; which is under construction; the budget of this project is 800 Million US $. Mr. BA-AMER was able to ensure the transition of SAMIR from a government owned state company to a stock exchange private company in a successful manner.

Marcus Frantz is Global Service Line Lead of Mid & Downstream Applications at OMV Group, based in Vienna. Marcus will offer a key insight into the specific needs of Refining business from the IT Point of View and how an integrated Refining IT Landscape helps the business to succeed in the demanding competitive environment. Focusing on experiences made during the setup and the ongoing implementation of a defined Refining Applications Landscape for OMV & Petrom, Marcus will detail which challenges IT sees ahead for the Refining business, how IT can contribute to deal with this challenges (especially in this rough times), how standard applications support the business needs to get the most value out of the least money and what Refining business needs to keep in mind to successfully execute an Refining IT Strategy.

Sola Alabi is Group Manager of Greenfield Refinery Projects at NNPC. He has over 30 year's experience in the energy industry and has been with NNPC since 1977. Within this time, he has held several positions within the business, including Technical Coordinator (1995-1997), Head of LNG (1999-2004), Managing Director & CEO of the Port Harcourt Refinery Company (2007). Sola is Chairman of the NNPC Headquarters Tenders Committee and a Fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers. He holds a B.Sc (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Lagos.

Ugur Öcal was educated at Istanbul University where he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration. He has been working as an energy analyst at the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) for 6 years. He is one of the analysts who produce the World Energy Outlook (WEO) series, which is the flagship publication of the IEA.

Elisabeth is a Research Manager and Senior Research Scientist at the independent research institute SINTEF Materials and Chemistry in Norway. She has an M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from NTNU in Trondheim, and has been working in SINTEF, first as a Research scientist, since 1998. Elisabeth has experience in upgrading of gas and oil facilities, mainly through catalysis and absorption. She has participated in many client projects within processes like catalytic cracking, dehydrogenation of ethane/propane and sulphur reduction of gasoline and diesel, as well as purification of produced water. She is the author of 13 published papers.

Born in 1954, Reinhold started his professional carrier as an assistant engineer on heavy lift cargo ships carrying oil field equipment to the Middle East region. After graduating as a Chief Marine Engineer, he worked for four years for Mobil Oil Corp. on oil tankers before he joined Schlumberger in 1983. During this time he held many positions in numerous countries in wireline, welltesting and utility services. In 2000 he joined Endress+Hauser in Weil am Rhein. As the Global Industry Manager Oil&Gas he is responsible for the promotion and business development of this industry for Endress+Hauser.

Alan is Product Manager Refinery Solutions in the Oil Refining and Downstream Global Centre of Excellence. He has 34 years experience in oil refining, including extensive experience in process design, process automation and advanced process control. He has also been responsible for the development and rollout of the industry specific control libraries for the AC800M controller. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from UMIST (Manchester UK).

Robert Jablonski is General Manager of Metegrity, an asset management company for the process industry. Its flagship product Visions Enterprise is considered the leading and most-proven lifecycle management software product on the market. Mr. Jablonski has over 18 years’ background in business management, Information Technology and software development and is the author, designer and developer of the premier Visions Enterprise product which incorporates a risk-based inspection basis to ensure profits and top facility production. He has extensive experience in overseeing the IT operations of large companies as well as intricate knowledge of the specific requirements and details of the process industry and plant operations. With the unique expertise of Mr. Jablonski and other Metegrity team members, Visions Enterprise is flawlessly implemented at renowned client installations while incorporating each company’s unique requirements and requests.

David Maguire had over 20 years’ experience as a corrosion specialist with Shell Canada before joining the Metegrity team and is a member of NACE, National Association of Corrosion Engineers, in Canada. At Shell, he was the corporate lead in implementing Metegrity’s premier product, Visions Enterprise and training users in it at all Shell Canada sites. His extensive expertise in plant management software, facility corrosion, and the production and financial challenges faced in his industry, made his introduction to Visions Enterprise more meaningful. It impressed upon him the results a highly successful risk-based inspection management product can have on a process facility’s profits, operations and equipment lifespan.

Harald Linga has been responsible for technology development within ProPure since the start-up in 1999, and is now leading the product development within the Pure Group, comprising the sister companies ProPure (Norway), ProSep (US), Pure Group Asia Pacific (KL) and TORR Canada. He has 25 years experience within research and product development for the oil and gas industry, and has held positions with SINTEF, Christian Michelsen Research and Framo Engineering. His main focus has been related to multiphase flow, gas conditioning, mass transfer and separation. He holds a M.Sc. in technical physics and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Graham is a Director of DNV Energy with specific responsibility for DNV’s global refining & petrochemicals activities. A mechanical engineer by degree qualification, Graham left industry 20 years ago to work within a consultancy environment, where he has been developing and applying risk management techniques for a wide range of clients. He has been retained by both industry and regulators to peer review safety case submissions in a number of industry sectors, where he has also written and provided training courses in risk and reliability assessment. He is the author of a number of papers, and was also a member of the API/DNV team responsible for validating Risk Based Inspection technologies. Graham has led several incident investigations in the refining & petrochemicals sector, and subsequently assisted the companies concerned with recovery programmes. He has also supported a number of clients in both the industrial and financial segments in purchaser and vendor due diligence reviews for mergers, acquisitions and disposals.

Ulrika Wising is the Director Sales & Marketing for Belsim since October 2007. Ulrika has been working with process improvements in industry since 1998. Before starting at Belsim in 2007, Ulrika was a Post Doctoral Fellow at Ecole Polytechinque in Montreal. In that position she worked together with Industrial partners to continuously improve their processes for increased profitability. Ulrika finished her PhD at Chalmers University of Technology in 2003 and before that she completed her M Sc. Chem. in 1999.

Martin Hess has been General Manager of INTERTEC since 1997. He graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a Dipl.-Ing. in Process Engineering. After his Diploma he developed renewable energy projects at ETA GmbH. From 1985 he worked for Linde AG in Munich. INTERTEC was founded in 1965 by Martin Hess' father, Dr.-Ing Joachim Hess, who had previously worked as the first director of the AGIP refinery in Ingolstadt (now Bayernoil). Besides managing INTERTEC, Martin Hess continues to work as one of the company's specialist designers of field protection equipment, combining protection know-how with process engineering to produce products such as passively cooled shelters.

Dr Yogesh Gupta achieved his Doctorate in Chemical Engineering from Loughborough University. Dr. Gupta has been working for Aggreko Process Services since 2008, where he is mainly responsible for designing conceptual process packages to resolve temperature related constrains in refining and petrochemical industries. Dr. Gupta is expert in conceptual plant design – able to involve in all stage of project life cycle including conceptual design and plant layout, equipment selection, through to plant hand-over to manufacturing which includes the process design of chemical skid and FEED. Prior to joining Aggreko Process Services, Dr. Gupta has worked for BP and Massachusetts Green Energy Fund as a consultant between the year 2004 and 2006. He has won several prices for his work world wide and is a peer reviewer for academic journals.

Nico Wesselingh is responsible for the engineering department in Aggreko Process Service Europe. In that role he is responsible for the design and implementation of the refinery and petrochemical oriented solutions that Aggreko APS is offering in the market. Nico, graduated in electrical engineering, has a very long experience in design of thermal energy related systems in an industrial environment. Started at first in a role as technical support engineer at the leading manufacturer of refrigeration units and on this moment dedicated to the design of innovative (temperature related) solutions to create added value to the customers’ products.

Maarten Martens studied Business Administration and has spent the biggest part of his working career in developing advanced solutions for different businesses. As the general manager of Aggreko Process services he is responsible for delivering the companies services to refineries and chemical plants. A comment from Mr. Martens when we wrote this profile for him was: ‘what is interesting for me to do is creating a service to our customers that seems to be organic with the organization of the customer’. According to Mr. Martens it is only worth wile delivering technical solutions (especially to refineries) if the customer has a direct benefit that sits on the bottom of his P&L. ‘Customers are not so interested these days in pieces of steel or consulting services – the bottom line is what counts’ according to Mr. Martens.

As General Manager, Haruhisa Kawamura manages MES product and business development for Yokogawa globally. He joined Yokogawa in 1977 and started his career as an instrumentation engineer for petroleum and chemical customers. Then he moved on to the IT segment for engineering tools development and corporate PC environment standardization in 1991. In 2000 he was appointed Solution-based Software Marketing Manager in the area of Advanced Operation Assistance and expanded his area of responsibility to Plant Information Management Systems and Advanced Process Control. Finally he was appointed General Manager for MES product and business development in 2006 to deliver customers Production Excellence Solutions.

Bernard Haigh holds an engineering degree from the University of Cambridge and a geophysics PhD from Durham University. After working with BP in London, he joined Marex Technology (now Yokogawa Marex) which was active in measuring, monitoring and recording environmental conditions and platform responses primarily in the North Sea. Within Yokogawa Marex, Bernard has worked on design and implementation of major Production Information Management projects including Refinery Information Systems, a Russian Nuclear Power Plant and several offshore oil platform information systems. Bernard is now responsible for the design and creation of plant model based software which provides object-based application software for mass/energy balancing, data reconciliation, production accounting and production performance monitoring.

As Plant Asset Management Specialist, Herman van Veen supports European- and African service market development for the Yokogawa industries. He holds a bachelor degree in AOT which is General Operational Technology. Herman has more than twenty years industrial experience in oil and gas segments, chemical / petrochemical-, and food industry all within various disciplines. Starting in 1988 as project engineer, he joined Yokogawa in 1991 as European project support specialist. In 1994 he was assigned as project manager and did many international projects in the oil and gas- as well as the chemical / petrochemical industry. As from 2008 he is appointed to his present position, developing services for all Yokogawa products and solutions in targeted industries, oil and gas downstream being one of these. Based in Yokogawa Europe Headquarters in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, together with his team, he provides service support to the company’s sales offices and distributors in Europe and Africa.

As Business Development Manager, Eric Jan Kwekkeboom manages European- and African market development for Yokogawa in oil and gas downstream, especially with refinery and petrochemical industry segments. He holds bachelor degrees in process engineering and chemical engineering and graduated in business to business marketing. Eric Jan has more than twenty years experience in several oil and gas segments and in various disciplines, starting in 1988 as a specialist for process equipment, moved on to process instrumentation and process analyzers in 1990 and was appointed Industry Marketing Director for process automation solutions in 1999. He finally joined Yokogawa Europe in 2008. Appointed to his present position, he develops strategies and plans for all Yokogawa products, solutions and services related to the oil and gas downstream industries. Based in Yokogawa Europe Headquarters in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, together with his team, he provides industry solution support to the company’s sales offices and distributors in Europe and Africa.

Steve Turner is a consultant with Honeywell Process Solutions. He has many years experience in the implementation of Advanced Applications for the Oil & Gas, Refining and Petrochemical industries. His experience includes application engineering and consultancy, project management, operations management and business development. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College, London and is based in the UK.

After working for ExxonMobil for six years as an engineer Andy Coward moved to Honeywell where he has worked for the last 12 years. He has worked in both projects and in sales, delivering over 50 advanced control applications on different refinery, petrochemical and oil and gas processes. He now manages the sales for the advanced process control line of business for Honeywell across EMEA.

Paolo Collaro holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering obtained in 1985 in Florence, Italy. In 2001 he joined Burckhardt Compression AG, Switzerland. Today he covers the function of Senior Sales Manager, being responsible for the sale of new units in the refinery segment and petrochemical/chemical industry. Besides his technical background he has built a wide expertise in risk management related to complex projects. His career started in Italy with the General Electric group at Nuovo Pignone in Florence. He spent 11 years in the GE group gaining experience in several different disciplines, from after sales service to contracting and sales. Paolo is also Six Sigma trained.