SPE Board Announces Nominees 2021 President and 2020 Directors
Authors: Feder Judy 
Published: March 2019

Tom Blasingame is the nominee for 2021 SPE President. He and four others make up the slate of nominees recommended for positions open on the SPE Board of Directors.

2021 SPE President

Tom Blasingame is a professor and holder of the Robert L. Whiting Professorship in the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University. His teaching and research activities focus on petrophysics, reservoir engineering, analysis and interpretation of well performance, exploitation of unconventional reservoirs, and technical mathematics. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the university. As of February 2019, Blasingame has graduated 67 MS (thesis) students, 34 MEng (report, non-thesis) students, and 14 PhD students. He served as assistant department head of graduate programs for the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M from 1997 to 2003 and has been recognized with several teaching and service awards.

2020 SPE Directors

Regional Director Middle East

Qasem Al-Kayoumi is senior vice president technical center in Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s (ADNOC) Upstream Directorate. His work experience includes drilling, reservoir management, reservoir simulation, field development, business planning, field operations, and technology development and deployment.

Al-Kayoumi has been a member of SPE since 1985 and received a Regional Service Award in 2009. He helped establish the SPE Abu Dhabi Section, served as its chairman from 1993 to 1994, and continues to play an active role in section activities.

Regional Director North America

Zachary Evans is a senior storage engineer for TransCanada, based in Charleston, West Virginia. His work experience includes multiple underground gas storage development projects in the Appalachian Basin, specializing in reservoir characterization and performance monitoring, well integrity assessment, well test analysis, regulatory compliance, workover prioritization, employee hiring and training, and capital project oversight, and growth and expansion project coordination on the Columbia Gas Pipeline System. Before joining TransCanada, he worked in directional drilling and openhole logging as an MWD/LWD engineer and senior field engineer for Schlumberger in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Australia.

Technical Director Drilling

David Reid is chief marketing officer for NOV, where he advises on technology development, direction, and acquisition strategies for the company. He also develops company culture strategies and provides internal consultancy and advice on market trends. He has held field, management, and executive roles at NOV in E&P business and technology, product management, and drilling rig package development. Reid joined Varco International in 1992 and has worked in Scotland, California, and Houston in service, operations, design, business and product development, leadership, and management roles. He has served on the board of directors of the NOV and Schlumberger IntelliServ joint venture since 2009.

Technical Director Production & Facilities

Robert Pearson is the technical director and founder of Glynn Resources, a consulting company based in Calgary. He has worked in production operations, completions engineering, and field development planning for onshore, offshore, frontier, and unconventional developments in several geographic regions. Pearson spent 10 years at Shell International prior to moving to Canada with Petro-Canada, now Suncor, as a district production operations supervisor. He cofounded and was subsequently president of APA Petroleum Engineering, which is now part of the RPS Energy Group. He worked for the group in Singapore and Brisbane before returning to Canada in 2015.