InterOil Corp. has appointed former BG Group chief executive officer and Shell executive Chris Finlayson as chairman-designate.
Finlayson, 58, joins the board immediately, and will replace Dr. Gaylen Byker. Finlayson, who is a director of Lloyd’s Register, is the former chief executive of FTSE 100 company BG Group and a former executive vice president and managing director with Royal Dutch Shell.
He resigned from BG in April 2014 just after a year of taking post for personal reasons, leading to speculations of the firm being broken up and suggestions it would be a takeover target.
Finlayson has nearly 40 years’ global experience and has led exploration and production ventures in Russia, Nigeria, Brunei, UK North Sea, Europe and Asia with BG Group and Shell, overseeing production of more than one million barrels of oil equivalent a day and directing several major capital projects.
Finlayson has more than 15 years’ senior level experience in the LNG industry, covering upstream development through to LNG shipping and marketing, and has worked successfully with customers, joint venturers, national oil companies, and governments, particularly in major LNG-importing countries such as China, Japan and Korea.
Finlayson, a geologist, physicist and petroleum engineer, says he was excited to join InterOil as it moved into development of Elk-Antelope.
“In the past year, we have signed a multi-billion-dollar LNG agreement with Total, streamlined our business to focus on exploration and development, strengthened our balance sheet, assembled a first-class senior management team, and begun a fully funded drilling program that is one of the biggest in Papua New Guinea’s history,” says Dr. Michael Hession, InterOil chief executive.
Dr. Byker announced in June that he would retire after 17 years on the board.
In March, Total and InterOil began Papua New Guinea’s largest exploration and appraisal campaign across about 16,000sq km of its licenses that surround the Elk-Antelope discovery in petroleum retention license (PRL) 15. Total is the operator of PRL 15 with a 40.1% interest. Joint venture partners include InterOil (35.5%), Oil Search (22.8%) and indirect participating interests, which hold 1.6% (gross).
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