Meet the keynote speakers

Greg Rock is the VP Development at OMV Petrom responsible for exploration, drilling, development and well abandonment. After graduating with a geochemistry PhD at Newcastle University, Greg joined Centrica in 2002 in the UK as a geologist and spent time offshore in the North Sea alongside office based development projects. Next step was a 7 year stint with Perenco working exploration in West Africa, UK, SE Turkey and N. Iraq; a 3 year New ventures position with Maersk in Copenhagen – then a move to OMV in 2014. Over the last 11years Greg has held various technical and managerial positions in Vienna, Abu Dhabi, Stavanger and since January 2024 in Bucharest with OMV Petrom.

Dr Auke Barnhoorn holds a tenured Associate Professor position in Applied Geophysics and Petrophysics at the Department of Geoscience and Engineering at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands). In addition, he is currently the Director of the Geoscience and Engineering Laboratory. His main research interests are rock physics and rock mechanics and failure forecasting. He uses experimental facilities in Delft to study the anisotropic properties of rocks combining geomechanical and acoustic measurements and 3D imaging of the rock structures. His research has applications in e.g., geothermal energy, CO2 storage and induced seismicity. Auke is educated at Utrecht University in the Netherlands where he holds a MSc in geology and at ETH-Zürich (Switzerland) where he received his PhD. After his PhD he had post-doc positions at the Australian National University in Canberra (Australia) and at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His post-doc research in Utrecht was financed by a personal 3-year VENI-grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). He research is funded by in national and international funding schemes in which university, research institutes and companies participate.  in multiple national and internation research projects, such as Deep. Current research is funded by  the CEPT CCS Q-Fibre project,  by the NWO Induced Seismicity program DeepNL and by the collaborative infrastructure initiatives EPOS-NL, EPOS-Enlarge and the EU Horizon consortium Excites. Auke currently is the author/co-author of >50 journal papers with an h-index of 28  (Google Scholar).

Rob Gruenwald is a business owner and Director of MS E-Int. Sol. and AM & NBD advisor for ADX Energy. After graduating from UIB, Norway in structural and petroleum geology, Rob joined Wintershall in 1997and was active in on- and offshore exploration projects working in Germany, Libya, Brazil, Qatar and Romania. He spent over 7 years with Repsol in 2005 as AM, EM and NBD in US & Canadian Arctic, Brazil, Libya and Algeria. In 2012, Rob joined Sasol South Africa as AM Mozambique and global NBD and M&A LATAM and Africa, before joining QPI as Head of International NV adding various assets to the company. Since 2018, he held the position of the EM of Hunt Oil of Romania and still resides in the country. Thereafter, he was instrumental in founding various E&P as well as GT startups, amongst Tenaz EnergyCorp. and his own enterprise, he is active as senior advisor in the field of tectonic brine mining and geothermal energy for Vulcan, MS Energy, MCF, EPL-Germany, ADX as well as M&A in E&P.

Dave Quinn is the Managing Director of Badley Geoscience. Prior to progressing to that role in 2021 he was a Structural Geologist at Badleys for 15 years, building on his PhD in Variscan tectonics awarded by University College Cork, Ireland. As a consultant he completed numerous fault seal, geomechanics and structural integrity projects. His experience extends to every major hydrocarbon province globally. He is a Trustee, Chair, and sits on several geoscience society/publication committees.