Aman Venkat is the CEO and Executive Consultant of Spark Thought, based in Houston, Texas.

With an infinite penchant for learning and over 18 years of experience, Aman sought out to create a consulting firm that ties clients to the right resources. It was with this intention that she founded Spark Thought, a management consulting firm that creates innovative solutions for clients to capture, share, and effectively use knowledge management systems to achieve their goals.

Aman, who is fluent in four languages, has a Master's in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from HEC, Paris. For her, honing her personnel's expertise and directing them effectively is incredibly important. At Spark Thought, she effectively identifies organizational gaps and brings forth a touch of innovation to bridge them. Her thought-process as a solutions strategist is highly structured, allowing her to provide easy and actionable solutions.

Over the past nine years, she has grown the company into a multi-industry firm, serving sectors from oil & gas to technology. She leads a team of seasoned individuals, each flourishing in their field of expertise.

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Dr. Duyvestyn specializes in HDD and trenchless technologies. He has been responsible for over 700,000 feet of HDD and 150,000 feet of tunneling, microtunneling, Direct Pipe, open shield pipe jacking, pilot tube microtunneling, auger boring, and guided auger boring installations. He is experienced in performing feasibility studies, design, trenchless design calculations, geotechnical evaluations, risk assessments, cost estimation, value engineering, constructability workshops, claim review, contractor pre-determination qualification, bid services, and construction administration/management. He has worked on projects governed by FERC, NOAA, USACE, and other regulatory agencies.

Dr. Duyvestyn served as a contributing author to ASCE’s Manual of Practice 108 (second edition) entitled “Pipeline Design for Installation by Horizontal Directional Drilling” and is currently assisting in the writing of the ASCE’s Manual of Practice for Direct Pipe. He is also an instructor of the HDD Good Practices Guidelines on behalf of the North American Society of Trenchless Technology.

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Dr. Shah specializes in soil and geological investigations, as well as geotechnical evaluations. He provides geotechnical and civil engineering specialty services such as rock anchor and anchor bolt pull testing, micropile design, installation, and oversight, driven pile and wave equation analyses, soil boring oversight, on-site concrete and asphalt placement oversight and testing, and various construction testing services. He has performed soil property and classification tests in a laboratory environment to supplement engineering design requirements and specifications. He has been involved in monitoring and reporting of various remediation and Superfund sites, and has provided construction and materials oversight services, including the inspection of various soil and rock structures for a variety of public and private projects. Dr. Shah has assisted in the development of designs, site plans, specifications, and cost estimates for various municipal and private entities for solid waste handling and recycling facilities, landfills, and underground storage tank (UST) facilities.

Dr. Shah was nationally recognized by Engineering News-Record (ENR) as one of the Top 20 under 40 for the New York Metropolitan Region, the American Society of Civil Engineers as the “Face of Civil Engineering” for 2013, and the Young Engineer of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Professional Engineers in 2012. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, teaching foundation design.

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Master of Science:

• Certified Safety Professional (24549)
• Professional Wetland Scientist (1359)
• Mold Assessment Consultant (MAC1507)
• Lead Risk Assessor (2071181)

David began his professional career in the environmental field in 1998, after completing his Master’s Degree in Biology at Old Dominion University. His first job was with a mid-Atlantic, regional Engineering firm based in Virginia, where he supported transportation and land development projects. This experience led to an opportunity in Houston, Texas in 2000, with a national planning and design firm. Most of David’s work here involved natural resources assessment and NEPA support on roadway projects.

In 2002, David joined a regulatory consulting firm specializing in onshore and offshore oil and gas operations. David managed their Environmental Department, focused on providing State and Federal compliance support to drilling, production, pipelines, and terminals.

For the following years, David held various HSE roles with a number of organizations, including an E&P company, two offshore drilling contractors, and two consulting firms.

In 2016, David founded Latitudes Environmental, a consulting firm focused on providing quality, cost effective technical services.

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Scott Gaille is a lawyer and academic, teaching annually at Rice University’s Graduate School of Business and semiannually at the University of Chicago Law School. Scott has authored three energy textbooks (International Energy Development, Shale Energy Development, and Construction Energy Development) and six peer-reviewed articles in the Energy Law Journal. Scott’s law firm, GAILLE PLLC, is an outside general counsel and energy transactions boutique, including extensive work in the area of construction and services agreements.

Prior to founding GAILLE PLLC, Scott served as the Chief Compliance Officer, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary for a NASDAQ-listed exploration and production company focused on developing shale formations in Texas and Europe. Previously, he was Managing Director & General Counsel to a private investment fund, President of a private-equity backed E&P company focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, and Director – Business Development for Occidental Oil & Gas Corporation. Prior to joining Oxy, Scott practiced law with the Energy Section of Vinson & Elkins and was a judicial clerk to the Honorable Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

Mr. Gaille was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago, where he received his Doctor of Law Degree with High Honors in 1995. He attended undergraduate college at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Government with High Honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

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Dr. Warneke has 16 years of Cavern Drilling, Mining and Operations experience. He began working as an underground mining engineer/production supervisor at the Cargill Salt Mine at Avery Island. Dr. Warneke then left his position to obtain a Ph.D. in Mining Engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology. After earning his Ph.D., he became a Research Fellow for the CDC/NIOSH Spokane Research lab conducting health and safety research in underground mines relating to blasting practices in weak rock mass mines, roof control in rock burst prone mines, and other projects. In 2010, Dr. Warneke joined Texas Brine Company as Senior Mining Engineer providing leaching simulations, long term cavern field planning, and assistance to well workovers. In 2012, he became Manager of Wells placing him in charge of maintenance of all caverns, head of engineering of new caverns, and responsible for all regulatory requirements.

On August 3rd, 2012, the Bayou Corne Sinkhole occurred, Dr. Warneke was tasked with overseeing the company’s technical response to the sinkhole. This included designing instrumentation, drilling the re-entry well into the failed cavern, installing shallow aquifer relief wells, leading a multiple team of experts relating to geophysics, rock mechanics, soil mechanics, slope stability and water quality. Currently, Dr. Warneke is Vice President of Engineering at Cavern Solutions, Inc. Since joining Cavern Solutions, Dr. Warneke has become a 3rd party subject matter expert (brine mining, hydrocarbon storage, field planning and integrity analysis) for operators, conducting failure analysis on caverns close to the edge of salt domes, creating and implementing cavern integrity management programs (Gas and Hydrocarbon storage,) planning seismic acquisition to help determine salt sediment interface on flanks of salt domes, and conducting asset studies for optimization of hydrocarbon storage and purchase/lease of salt caverns.

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Mark started off in sales and has sold over $305 million to the oil & gas industry and has had over 2200 meetings with almost every oil & gas company that you can name. He’s done business in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the UK, Middle East, Mexico, Canada, Norway, Scotland, Brazil and in the good ol’ US of A to name a few.

Later he started his own market research company and has a well-earned reputation as an industry “insider” and independent 3rd party researcher, helping other companies figure out where their product or service “fits” in the Oil and Gas industry. All of his clients love his work, which is important to him. And providing easy to realize value is on the top of his list.

This led to him becoming a part of the new media, where he has the top podcasts in the oil and gas industry. He takes his ethical and factual reporting to heart, and loves getting those fascinating stories out there.

Besides the podcasts Mark is also a sought after public speaker offering keynote, industry expertise and panel moderation. All mixed with a bit of Oilfield humor and entertainment.

He is an author, sits on several oil & gas boards, has one of the top oil & gas presences in social media and volunteers his time to teach STEM’s at local schools.

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Adam Hartung started his first company, building a very early product to automate newspaper set-up, while still in college - selling the company his senior year. After completing his MBA at Harvard, with Distinction, Adam was a Strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and subsequently led strategy for PepsiCo - focusing on how to innovate for growth. Leading strategy for Dupont, Adam had responsibility for all intellectual capital projects and managed all patents, copyrights, trademarks as well as Intellectual Property acquisitions, sales and joint ventures. The $3B division he built at Computer Sciences Corporation focused on unleashing innovation in organizations for rapid growth and higher valuation. His application of innovation has included corporate turn-arounds, and multiple start-up ventures.

After working with Clayton Christensen for 6 years, Financial Times Press in 2007 published Adam's seminal work on how organizations deal with innovations and marketplace disruptions - "Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition." Since Dr. Christensen's recent death, Adam is now considered the global leader in understanding Disruptive Innovations, as well as the global leader in his own expertise of organizational adaptation to disruptive innovations and all types of marketplace disruptions.

Adam wrote the Strategy, Leadership and Innovation column for Forbes magazine from 2009 through 2018, and his 400+ columns (as of early 2020) had over 90million readers. Adam wrote the quarterly Strategy and Leadership column for CIO Magazine from 2008 through the publication's wrap-up in 2019. He was a founding editor, and still contributes, to the academically-oriented International Journal of Innovation Science. Adam created and implemented the "Strategy and Leadership" as well as the "Managing During Disruption" programs for the National Association of Corporate Directors, where he is a Certified Board Leadership Fellow. He is also a certified financial expert with the SEC.

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Chad W.J. Theriot is the CEO and President of CBM Technology

Mr. Theriot has over twenty years of experience in designing, developing, and implementing custom software solutions. His experience has covered multiple industries and scaled the entire enterprise from board level engagements to detailed end user interaction. He is fluent in many programming languages and data warehousing technics. His wide range of information technology skills has served a distinguished list of companies such as UPS Airlines, Houston Transit Authority, British Columbia Transit Authority, Kellogg Corporation and Johnson & Johnson, just to name a few. Mr. Theriot is also an innovative entrepreneur. He has been involved in launching startups such as AudioScribe, which provides Speech Recognition for the Court Reporting industry, and WorldLive, which provides asset compliance and employee competency tracking for any industry.

In addition to his skills as a developer, Mr. Theriot is well versed in hardware, web technologies, wireless protocols, radio frequency technology and all levels of pure Cloud, Hybrid, and on premise deployments.

Mr. Theriot’s driving principle is to not let technology get in the way of companies trying to deliver the best service and value to their customers while using every possible technology to help businesses achieve their goals more efficiently. He is quoted as saying “There is a point where automation stops helping and starts to fight the people using the system. All great systems know this point, and how to handle the hand off.” Mr Theriot believes that empowering people through real time automation is the key to being able to handle any business problem.

Mr. Theriot is very involved in the community and has served on many boards such as the BBB of Acadiana, Lafayette Area Chamber of Commerce, Louisiana Workforce Development Board #40, Festival International de Louisiane, Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE), Habitat for Humanity’s Lafayette Chapter and Teche Center for the Arts.

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Geoffrey Cann is an author, educator, podcaster, and inspiring professional speaker. His passion is the Oil and Gas industry, essential to our modern industrial society, and its imperative to exploit digital innovations as it transitions to new fuels. He has worked around the world, including Canada, the US, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Australia and the Caribbean over a 35 year career. He teaches a 1-day seminar on digital oil and gas, produces a weekly article and podcast on digital issues in energy, and has published his first book, Bits, Bytes and Barrels: The Digital Transformation of Oil and Gas.

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