Special Thanks to Our Host:

Stephen Trauber  
Steve Trauber joined Citi in 2010 as a Vice Chairman and Global Head of Energy. Mr. Trauber previously worked at UBS Investment Bank from 2003 - 2010 as a Vice Chairman and Global Head of Energy.  Mr. Trauber began his career with Credit Suisse First Boston (1988–1995) and subsequently managed Morgan Stanley’s Energy Group in Houston (1995–2003).
 
Mr. Trauber has served as financial advisor on over $300 billion of energy transactions, which include many of the most significant M&A and financing transactions in the oilfield service, exploration and production and refining and marketing sectors. 
 
Mr. Trauber serves on the Board of Directors for Theater Under the Stars and its Foundation,  Society for the Performing Arts and its Foundation in Houston and is former Chairman of both Theater Under the Stars and Society for the Performing Arts.  He is also on the Board of Directors of the Greater Houston Partnership and the Houston Children’s Museum. Mr. Trauber is also an Overseer of the Jones Business School at Rice University as well as a College Associate at Rice University.  Mr. Trauber served on the Mayor’s Economic Development Task Force for the City of Houston.  Steve was awarded the first Annual Congressman Barbara Jordan award for Community Service and he and his wife are the recipients of the 2003 “I Have a Dream” award for their support of local children’s charities and of children’s education.  Mr. Trauber and his wife have Chaired 9 galas and/or Capital Campaigns for local charities raising over $20 million dollars.  
 
Mr. Trauber received his BA in Economics and Managerial Studies from Rice University in 1984. He was an Austin Scholar and earned his MBA from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in 1988.  He is married to Leticia and has three children:  Matthew (20), Alexis (19) and Jacob (16).

Speaker Bios:

Mark Mills  
Mark Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, CEO of the Digital Power Group (a tech-centric capital advisory group), faculty fellow at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and an advisory board member of Notre Dame University’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. Previously, he cofounded and was Chief Tech Strategist of Digital Power Capital, a boutique venture fund, and was chairman and CTO of ICx Technologies, which he helped take public in a 2007 IPO. Mills is a contributor to Forbes.com and coauthor of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005; Number One on Amazon’s science and math rankings). His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times Magazine. Mills is a frequent guest on CNN, Fox, NBC, and PBS, and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
 
Mills was a technology advisor for Bank of America Securities and coauthor of the Huber-Mills Digital Power Report, an energy-tech investment newsletter. He has testified before Congress and has briefed many state public-service commissions and legislators. Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan and subsequently provided science and technology policy counsel to numerous private-sector firms, the Department of Energy, and U.S. research laboratories.
 
Early in his career, Mills was an experimental physicist and development engineer at Bell Northern Research (Canada’s Bell Labs) and at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center on microprocessors, fiber optics, missile guidance, nuclear energy, and nonproliferation, earning several patents for his work. He holds a degree in physics from Queen's College in Ontario, Canada. 
Patrick Moore  

Dr. Patrick Moore has been a leader in the international environmental field for over 40 years. He is a co-founder of Greenpeace and served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada and seven years as a Director of Greenpeace International. Dr. Moore led many campaigns, helping to shape and to direct public policy for 15 years while Greenpeace became the world's largest environmental activist organization. 

In recent years, Dr. Moore has been focused on the promotion of sustainability and consensus building among competing concerns. He was a member of British Columbia government-appointed Round Table on the Environment and Economy from 1990 - 1994. In 1990, Dr. Moore founded and chaired the BC Carbon Project, a group that worked to develop a common understanding of climate change. Dr. Moore served for four years as Vice President of Environment for Waterfurnace International, a manufacturer of geothermal heat pumps, which use renewable earth energy, for residential heating and cooling. He also served as Vice-President, Industry and Government Affairs for NextEnergy Geothermal, the largest distributor of geothermal systems in Canada. As Chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance of BC from 1991 - 2002, he led the process of developing the "Principles of Sustainable Forestry" which were adopted by a majority of the industry.

 

In 2010, Dr. Moore published Trees are the Answer, a photo-book that provides a new insight into how forests work and how they can play a powerful role in solving many of our current environmental problems. In 2013 he published Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout – The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, which documents his 15 years with Greenpeace and outlines his vision for a sustainable future.

 

From 2000-2012 he served as Chair and Chief Scientist of Greenspirit Strategies, a consultancy focusing on environmental policy and communications in forestry, agriculture, fisheries and aquaculture, mining, biodiversity, energy and climate change. From 2006-2012 he served as co-Chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a US-based advocacy mission to build public support for more nuclear energy plants to provide electricity. In 2013 Dr. Moore, with his brother Michael and other family members, founded the Allow Golden Rice Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to seeing Golden Rice approved for commercial agriculture. 250 million children, mainly in the tropical countries, are deficient in vitamin A and as a result 2 million die each year. The Allow Golden Rice Now! Campaign demands that Greenpeace and their allies discontinue their campaign of opposition to Golden Rice, which could eliminate vitamin A deficiency if cultivated and consumed.

 

In 2014 Dr. Moore was appointed Chair of Ecology, Energy, and Prosperity at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Dr. Moore is also an independent ecologist/environmentalist with Ecosense Environmental Inc. 
Jessica Ogbonnaya  
Jessica Ogbonnaya is a Vice President in the Global Energy Group of Citigroup and  focuses on strategic advisory engagements and capital markets financings for companies in the upstream sector. Ms. Ogbonnaya joined the group in 2010 and has worked on a number of debt, equity and M&A transactions globally and across the various energy subsectors. Ms. Ogbonnaya relocated to London in early 2015 to work for Citi’s EMEA energy group where she was focused on international offshore and LNG assignments before returning back to Houston in 2016. Prior to joining Citi, Ms. Ogbonnaya worked as an analyst at Lehman Brothers. 
 
Ms. Ogbonnaya’s selected transaction experience includes the following: advisor to American Energy Partners – Marcellus on its acquisition of assets from East Resources ($1.75 bn); advisor to Petrobras on the divestment of its E&P assets in Peru to China National Petroleum Corporation (US$2.6 bn); advisor to Robbins & Myers on its corporate sale to National Oilwell Varco ($2.5 bn); advisor to Denver Parent Corporation in its management buyout of Venoco Inc. ($1.6 bn).  
 
Ms. Ogbonnaya is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Women in Energy. 
Ms. Ogbonnaya graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Spanish from Duke University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. 

Attendee Bios: 

Jeremy Arendt  

Jeremy Arendt was born and raised in Arizona. In 2007, he graduated magna cum laude from Arizona State with degrees in Finance and Economics after being granted a full academic scholarship. From 2005-2009, he created a blog called Rise of Reason in which he wrote and published articles on free market economics. In 2007, he began his career as an Analyst at Franchise Capital Advisors, a retail-focused investment banking firm. Arendt helped to launch American Residential Properties, a residential real estate private equity group that raised $100MM AUM and eventually became a NYSE-traded REIT (eventually acquired by another public REIT). Arendt graduated with honors from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2012.  He is currently the Vice President in M&A investment banking at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., an oil & gas focused investment banking and asset management company. He has advised on several billions of dollars of oil and gas M&A transactions including, but not limited to: Centennial, a Delaware Basin company, on its $1.575 billion sale to Silver Run; a publicly traded SPAC led by Mark Pappa (former CEO of EOG); Energen on four transactions in the Delaware Basin totalling ~$500MM; Crestwood on its simplification transaction between its GP and MLP, creating a ~$7 billion company; and Murphy Oil Corporation on their sale of 30% of their offshore Malaysia assets for $2 billion. He is currently a member of the Host Committee for the Adam Smith Society Professional Chapter in Houston. 
Katherine Butler   
Katherine Butler is in her second year in the MBA program at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This past summer, Butler was a Finance MBA intern with the Strategic Planning group within Marketing Services at Phillips 66 in Houston. Entering her second year of the MBA program, she will serve as Chief of Staff for the Rice Chapter of the Adam Smith Society and as the External Relations chair for the Energy Club. She is also involved with the Women in Energy Network. She currently serves as a Board Member for the DePelchin Children’s Center, as a member of Rice University Board Fellows. She also volunteers at the Houston Zoo as a member of the Junior League of Houston. Butler received her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, with a Bachelor of Science with High Honors in Communication Studies, as well as a Business Foundations Certificate with High Distinction. She received University Honors and was a member of Order of Omega, a Greek Honor Society.  Prior to Rice, she worked at Swift Worldwide Resources (now AirSwift) as a Business Analyst, where she was involved in the sale of the company from a UK-based private equity firm to a middle-market private equity firm based in the US.  
Scott Diamond  

Scott Diamond was formerly a financial analyst for the FDIC and is now an MBA candidate at Olin Business School at the Washington University in St. Louis. Diamond is formally studying corporate finance as a means to pursue careers where he can combine his passions for financial analysis and advancing social welfare. Given the generally large scale and the high level of financial complexity of corporations operating within the energy sector, he has opted to pursue careers within this industry. Additionally, he finds supporting this sector particularly rewarding given that the increasing availability of reliable and sustainable energy sources continues to result in improved standards of living for those around the world. Over the past several months, Diamond has had the privilege to support the Controllership of ExxonMobil in Doha, Qatar through an expatriate MBA internship assignment. Through his work in the Middle East, Diamond came to understand the major dynamics driving the fragmented liquefied natural gas market, as well as the rising importance of this relatively clean burning hydrocarbon in providing electricity to emerging economies through the world. Aside from his aforementioned academic and professional pursuits, Diamond retains board membership at the nonprofit organization CASA of Southwestern Illinois and serves as the Treasurer of BranchOut, a group supporting LGBT students at Washington University. Lastly, he is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and is an active member of the alumni associations of his alma mater in both Philadelphia and St. Louis.
Emily Doyle  

Emily Doyle is an MBA candidate at the Jesse H. Jones School of Business at Rice University. Focusing on Energy and Finance, Doyle is a member of the Energy Club and holds an officer position. Doyle is currently a Middle Distillates Trading Analyst at Shell Trading. Prior to this position she was a Commercial Analyst and Contract Coordinator within Shell Trading. In her current role, Doyle manages flat price, RVO exposure, and monthly rolls for distillates traders in USGC, Latin America, and Caribbean markets. Doyle has also worked with a Houston based start-up, Skynet Labs, a company that engaged in upstream drilling software. While there, she worked on business development, investor relations, and finance. She has also been an IB Analyst at Lehman Brothers. As a commercial analyst at Shell, Doyle was the recipient of three Shell Service Recognition Awards for her performance.  She has also been recognized by Shell WAVE (Women Adding Value Everywhere), Network Next, and is a Shell NPN Mentor Circle Facilitator. Emily Doyle attended Brown University, graduating in 2000 with an A.B. in Organizational Management & Behavior. Doyle holds a Master of Science in Early Childhood Education from Fordham University, where she graduated summa cum laude and was a member of Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Doyle is also certified in Training the Street Financial and Oil and Gas Modeling.  She can speak Spanish and French intermediately and has taken a semester of Mandarin and is a Brown Alumni School Committee Interviewer for Undergraduates. 
Justin Hayes  

Justin Hayes is a 30-year-old black American from the now infamous Aurora, CO. After receiving an all-expenses scholarship awarded to only 40 students in Colorado to any Colorado college  from the Boettcher Foundation, he decided to attend Colorado School of Mines and major in petroleum engineering, led by the belief that the affordability of energy is what determines quality of life beyond food, shelter, and health. After graduating from the International Baccalaureate program, he graduated cum laude in 2008 with a BS in petroleum engineering and a minor in geology. After college, Hayes moved to Houston to work for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, working as a production and reservoir engineer. In 2011, he married his wife Elizabeth, also a petroleum engineer from Aurora and Mines. In 2014, Hayes was co-author of a paper published by the industry’s premier professional organization (Society of Petroleum Engineers). In 2014, he also began a Professional MBA program at Rice University and graduated in May 2016. While in the MBA program he began to focus on social impact opportunities, starting as a mentor for first-year students. Hayes was a board member of two Houston based nonprofits during his MBA. Now he serves as  the chairman of  Nabor House Community, which provides low cost daycare and education for low income families with the requirement that parents pursue education or employment. He is currently looking into entrepreneurship in oil and gas.
John Krudy  
John Krudy is a second year MBA student at Michigan Ross, focused on management and entrepreneurship. He is the Business Development Manager for the Sakamoto Battery Project, which is developing novel energy solutions for the wearable and transportation markets. He is the Vice President for Corporate Relations for the Ross Armed Forces Association. He has spent the last two summers in San Francisco with transportation and e-commerce start-ups. Prior to Ross, Krudy was a captain in the Marine Infantry with deployments to South Asia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, for which he won a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Hillsdale College, with a minor in Journalism. 
Jonathan Lang  
Jonathan Lang received his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University. He then worked for two years at the White House on legislative affairs and trade policy. Following this, he wanted to professionally refocus on international economics, specifically related to the energy industry. Lang completed a Masters with merit honors in European Political Economics from the London School of Economics. His thesis analyzed the impact of both European Union and Member State level regulatory impacts on the growth of the European renewable energy industry. Following the LSE, he worked in strategic management consulting at Deloitte Consulting. While he learned a great deal about teamwork, strategy development, and business process analysis, he was not able to transfer internally to focus on the energy sector, particularly in investment strategy. To take the next step independently, Lang started his own geo-political and economic risk consultancy firm, primarily advising clients on international energy investment as well as performing supply chain risk analysis. To augment his work, Lang is currently completing a Global Executive MBA at Duke's Fuqua School of Business.  Additionally, he is an active member of the Atlantic Council and the Washington International Trade Association. He has also published articles on global oil and LNG markets in Global Risk Insights and OilVoice.com.
Nicholas Lilovich  
Nicholas Lilovich graduated Purdue University in 2010, earning degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics. While there, he was a research assistant, first with a particle physics lab and then with a nanotechnology lab that focused on energy production. He also managed a student organization called Pugwash, an organization that encouraged social responsibility in science and technology. After Purdue, he first worked as a consultant in nuclear power, with a focus on the US nuclear industry's response to the Fukushima event in Japan. He became an industry expert in several aspects, including spent fuel pool instrumentation. Lilovich then shifted to the social sector by becoming a sales engineer and project manager at social enterprise technology company, Samasource. After two years,  he matriculated at Chicago Booth to study economics, technology, and the energy sector.  While at Booth, he has become very involved in the Energy Policy Institute, participating in seminars, short courses, and some research on the energy market. He recently completed a white paper on Geoengineering as part of an Energy Policy Practicum course. He is a co-chair of two Booth student groups, the Adam Smith Society and Chicagonomics, that frequently cover energy topics.  This past summer, he worked at an industrial analytics company called Uptake, where he developed strategic initiatives and market entry plans for their energy generation team.
Clayton Mealer  
Clayton Mealer was born and raised in Defiance, Ohio and earned a degree in history and minor in nuclear engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point. After college, Mealer was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. While in the Army, he served as a tank company executive officer at Fort Riley, Kansas then as a scout platoon leader in Baghdad, Iraq. Following promotion to the rank of captain, he served as logistics officer for a reconnaissance squadron in Khowst, Afghanistan. His final assignment was commanding a troop of 200 cavalrymen in a reconnaissance squadron stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Mealer left the service so that he could attend graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a Masters in Engineering with a focus on supply chains and logistics. He subsequently received an MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he focused on finance and energy. Following graduation, he joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch's investment bank in Houston, Texas where he is able to work in their energy coverage practice. Mealer lives in Houston, Texas with his wife, Alexandra.
Shawn O'Brien  
Shawn O'Brien is currently a Consultant in Bain & Company's Chicago office, a leading global management consulting firm.  In this role, he works across a variety of functions and industries to solve some of business's most pressing problems for clients.  Prior to Bain, O'Brien obtained his part-time MBA at Carnegie Mellon University while working as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt at PNC Financial Services.  Outside of Bain, he is actively involved in the Chicago non-profit community as a member of the Big Shoulder Fund's Chairman Advisory Council and Advisory Board (BSF focuses on underprivileged children's early childhood education).
Ross Pedersen  
Ross Pedersen is a Vice President at Fifth Partners, a Dallas-based private equity firm, where he works on the energy team. His responsibilities at Fifth include sourcing Oil and Gas investments and running EquityMetrix, a portfolio company in the Oil and Gas software space. Prior to Fifth, he worked in politics on both field operations and policy teams. He also had a brief stint in the entertainment industry as a reality television singing competition contestant and later as the manager of a band touring Europe and Asia.  Pedersen is an avid rower having been captain of both his high school and college teams and representing the United States at a world championship. In his free time, he enjoys traveling and daydreaming about owning a yacht.
Santiago Perez Teuffer  
Santiago Perez Teuffer was born and raised in Mexico. He studied in Mexico City (Instituto Cumbres) all his life. He has an BS in Finance, from the renowned Mexican college, Monterrey Tech (ITESM). Since a young age, he has been very passionate about Mexico and very proud of his country.  Teuffer has made a strong career in Investment Banking (Equity Research branch), working from Mexico City in Credit Suisse. He covered the energy industry in Latin America. He was promoted to Vice President, becoming the youngest VP in Credit Suisse at the age of 26.  He had a direct involvement with the structuring and implementation of the Mexican Energy Reform, which opened the Energy Industry for private investment, and created a ground breaking opportunity for Mexico. He interacted with investors, and energy companies by educating them on the opportunities in the Mexican Energy Industry.  He is working towards a dual degree at Stanford; an MBA and an MS in Energy. His goal is to create the first Mexican integrated company that will produce shale gas in Mexico; setting an environmental benchmark for shale production in Mexico, and helping his country develop in a responsible way. On that note, he is currently doing an internship in a leading US shale company, FTSI, where he is focusing on the replacement of diesel-ran fleets to gas-ran fleets, thus reducing emissions from operations by 90%.  
Brad Raber  
Brad Raber graduated from UVA's Darden Graduate School of Business in 2015, where he was president of the Adam Smith Society. At Darden, he studied real estate finance and behavioral psychology. Raber is an autodidact in several subjects ranging from Austrian economics all the way to laissez faire economics. He further enjoys value investing, real estate, economic and financial history and is correspondingly very fun at parties. In his capacity as president, he is committed to establishing and strengthening the Adam Smith brand at UVA and building a wider dialogue for the moral and economic foundations of free-market capitalism. Raber attended the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked on prominent projects including the new International Terminal at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport as an engineer for the general contractor JV. Raber is an accomplished builder and real estate developer from Atlanta, Ga.
Erika Roby  
Erika Roby is a recent graduate of Cornell's Johnson School of Management where she served as VP of communications for the Adam Smith Society chapter for the past year. For five years prior to business school, she served as a legal consultant for some of San Francisco's top firms, spanning everything from corporate litigation to IP and Patent sales. Her most influential experience in law was when she consulted on a natural resources case at the Federal Court of Claims, which piqued her interest in the energy industry. For the past two years, Roby has participated in her school's energy club, in addition to leading Cornell's team to the National Energy Finance Case Competition in Austin, Texas. She also recruited heavily for Oil & Gas banking in Houston, Texas. She plans to work in Equity Research covering energy companies in New York.  
Eric Sipf  

Eric Sipf is originally from Denver, Colorado, and went to Wake Forest University for his undergraduate degree. There, he obtained a Bachelor of Science in Finance, followed by a Masters in Accountancy, also from WFU. After WFU, Sipf obtained his CPA license and started working for Ernst & Young in the Assurance practice in the Washington, D.C. area. He worked at EY for 4 years, working with clients in a variety of industries including real estate, software, and biotechnology. At EY, Sipf was selected to train a class of 30 first year associates (2 years before his peers). He also was selected to lead a team of 8 auditors through the IPO preparation process. His career at EY culminated with a promotion to manager one year ahead of schedule. He is a member of the AICPA and the VSCPA and is currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business (currently a second year). He did a summer internship at Chevron Corporation, in the Finance MBA Development Program, and will be joining Chevron after completion of his MBA. At Darden, he is the VP of Finance for the Energy Club, a second year coach, and a second year tutor for three classes. In his personal life, he is an Assistant Coach at the First Tee of Washington, D.C., and he is on the Benefit Committee for the Georgetown Lombardi Cancer Center.