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Appalachian Energy Symposium, April 20-21, 2026, at Marietta College | Ep 336
00:26:52
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Oil and gas production is the union
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of natural systems with advanced science and complex engineering.
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Smart people across the globe create this
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remarkable place we call Upstream.
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And each day brings a new challenge.
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This is the Oil and Gas Upstream
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podcast where we look at how these
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systems come together and learn from the
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people who make it happen.
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Welcome to Oil and Gas Upstream. I'm Elena Melkert, your host. Some of you know me as the former Director for Oil and Gas Upstream Research at the US Department of Energy. I retired from the doe, founded Energia Consulting, and joined the Oil and Gas Global Network. As a podcast host, I welcome our sponsor ifs. Through one comprehensive platform, IFS supports the unique needs of the oil and gas industry, resulting in streamlined workflows, automated business processes, and lower operating expenses through improved efficiency, all of which can help you maximize asset performance. Learn more@ifs.com and now today we have two guests from Marietta College in the Appalachian Basin, USA. Our first guest is Don Konkle, Trustee for the Board of Directors for Marietta College, and Dr. Ben Stewart, dean for the center of Earth, Energy and the Environment. Dawn, why don't we start with you? Tell us a little bit about yourself and thank you for joining us today
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and I appreciate you hosting us today. Just a little bit about myself. I grew up in in Appalachia, specifically in Cambridge, Ohio and had the privilege of attending Marietta College actually and graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor's of Science in Petroleum Engineering. I immediately went to work for Dowell Schlumberger and worked all over the world in fact. So I mostly in the U.S. the first part of my career and then went international in Dubai where I covered the Middle east for operation Support, then went to Aberdeen, Scotland and back to the US Ran the eastern half of the US for Schlumberger and and then ran the hydraulic fracturing business for Schlumberger before going back to the Middle east to manage OFS for Qatar and Yemen for Schlumberger and then came back and spent quite a bit of time really just developing technology for Schlumberger across most of those jobs, but specifically at the end for the production group where we were attempting to change the way we looked at technology around production.
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Oh my gosh. Around the world.
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Yeah, yeah. It allowed me to actually travel to close to 70 different countries. I had four global assignments there. It was a great experience. Got to meet lots of different cultures and really get embedded in what makes the world tick outside the US which, which I think is important for most Americans to understand and Then I left there. I went to work for Carbo Ceram, VP of marketing and sales, and then later finished up at Carbo as the president and CEO of the company. We had a focus obviously on manufacturing ceramic proppant as well as grinding media for the industrial part of the business and then went on to actually start to manufacture fertilizers. As we got involved, we found out that we make round things at a certain size very well and so that's important for precision planting in the ag business, in fact.
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Absolutely. My undergraduate work is in soil science and a big part of it had to do with the agriculture sector. And you're absolutely right. That's wonderful to hear. Keep going, Tell us more.
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Yeah, it's actually exciting. So I stepped down from Carbo. I needed a bit of a break and reassessed my next step in my career. Me and a business partner formed a company called Morpheus where we help entrepreneurs and startup companies bring their technology to the marketplace. We mentor them, we support them in how to. How to do just that and ultimately help them with exit plans for their company companies. Because most startup companies ultimately end up selling to somebody. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It keeps, keeps the mind thinking and keeps continuing to build my intellectual capital, which at my age is important.
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Keeps. Absolutely. I do know that piece about it. Yeah, absolutely.
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In the process of all that, when I was in the Middle east, my dad called me and said, I got somebody from an oil and gas company here wanting to lease my land. This was in 2012, which is actually the startup of the Utica Development there in Ohio. I got involved in actually minerals in Ohio. And ultimately now I run a land group which helps people who own their minerals lease their minerals to oil and gas companies. And then I didn't have enough to do. So I joined the board of trustees at Marion College last summer actually. And it's something that most small schools across the US are struggling a little bit. And so we, in surveying and understanding where our alumni actually go to work for, specifically in petroleum engineering, it was amazing how broad of a reach that actually do have. You think you get a petroleum engineering degree and you go to work for an oil and gas company, when in fact you can go to work for multiple different types of companies in multiple different areas. And so we, we're ultimately trying to look at and bring industry actually to this event that we're having to understand really how can we make that even better? How can we provide a better, a better platform to train and grow engineers primarily, or stem Related degrees into better talent. For these companies that we invited to this conference, it's the first of many. It's the inaugural conference, but our goal is to try to have one at least every six months to a year. I'm pushing for a year. Ben's pushing for six months.
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That's great. Tell us a little bit more about Marietta College itself. Is it has all the majors. It's not just energy or. It is energy.
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Yeah. Marietta is a smaller private school in Ohio. It has approximately 1,000 students. It's small, but it's liberal arts. And that's fundamentally one of the best things, I think, for me, it's actually the only liberal arts college in the US that has petroleum engineering degrees. Beyond petroleum engineering, there's multiple other engineering degrees. However, it spans from. It's got a very good athletic pull into the. From the Appalachia area. There's lots of other 60 different degrees, if you will, at Marietta.
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Okay.
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From nursing to teaching, too.
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Yeah. It's broad, considering how small it is, so that's great. And petrium engineering, of course. That's what I love. So, of course, I'm grateful that you have that there. Excellent. Let's move on to Dr. Ben Stewart. Ben, tell us a little bit about yourself.
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Oh, certainly. Thank you for having. Having Donna and I on the podcast. We are really appreciative. I didn't grow up in Appalachia, Ohio. I grew up in New Jersey. So New Jersey. Born and raised in. Born and raised in New Jersey. Went to the State University of New Jersey, which is Rutgers. I went to Rutgers University actually for my bachelor's. Was planning to leave, but I had an opportunity to work for the Hazardous Waste Management Research Group under David Koss in there, and he recruited me for grad school. So I stayed and got my master's and my PhD at Rutgers as well. So biochemical and biochemical engineering took me actually to the Midwest. So I took a position about an hour west of here in Athens, Ohio, at Ohio University. Spent 20 years of my career in civil engineering, teaching mostly environmental courses. My research was in acid mine drainage to start, and then we got into biofuels and so algae bioreactors and harvesting and product processing, separations, extractions, things like that. After about 20 years, I had an opportunity to go to Norfolk, Virginia, and be the chair of civil and Environmental engineering at Old Dominion University. Quickly became the senior associate dean, and when the dean took a position elsewhere, I was the interim dean for about a year and a half, and eventually I was given the position of dean. So I was the dean of the Batten College of Engineering and Technology at Old Dominion University. Didn't last long. We were going through Covid at the time, and a lot of things were changing, and I actually decided to go back into industry. And so I went into consulting. I was a consulting engineer, worked for a contracting firm doing water and wastewater plant optimization and some upgrading. And I did that for a while. But at the pole back to Appalachia, the southeastern Ohio region, was always there. Some of my children are here, some of my grandchildren are here. So an opportunity came up with the Marietta College. A position was posted for the dean of the center for Earth, Energy and the Environment. And I couldn't resist. That's where I am now, and I'm loving every minute of it.
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Yeah, that's great. Tell us about the center.
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Sure. The petroleum engineering program, as Don spoke about, is very highly respected and it's widely. There's 70 years, Don, 70 or more years of programming the accredited program. Again, it's been here for a long time, very well known. But Marietta College is more than just petroleum engineering, as he said, there's over 60 majors, and they started an environmental engineering program, environmental science. And those are as a licensed environmental engineer. Those are things that speak to me. So the center for Earth Energy and the Environment is actually looking at those three sectors. Earth I consider to be the resources. So that includes the natural resources. Anything we dig out of the ground that we can use for energy and other purposes. Energy, looking at not just the hydrocarbons, but looking at fossil fuels, but looking at other types of energy. And obviously the environment, doing so in a responsible, sustainable manner. Right. And being a steward to the environment. So the opportunity is to look at a broader application of energy. My background in biofuels, for example. But there are other opportunities outside of that. And so the center, what it was actually intended to do was to look at the needs within the industry and be responsive to those needs. And how to how does Marietta College develop academic programming to train professionals in not just petroleum engineering, but in a more diverse engineering fields? And the best way that I could think of doing that is to talk to people like Don. We met in the first semester that I was here. I did a presentation to the board and said pretty much what I'm saying now. I need to go out, contact industry, contact the professionals, find out what it is that they need from their new hires, and then how can I develop programming to get our students into those career professions again, inside and outside of petroleum and throughout the environmental areas that are in Appalachia, Ohio and beyond.
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Yeah. Oh, gosh, that is so exciting. I'm happy for you and impressed about what we're doing. You've got Don, with this worldwide career in oil and gas and other things. I think you said minerals. Does that include like the critical minerals as well? And, and all of that? I mean, is that part of the earth that benefits?
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I would say I'm self study on critical and rare earth minerals and, and certainly other forms of energy outside of petroleum engineering. Hydrogen and some other energy. So.
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Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. As we were talking about earlier, I just got back from the SARAH week and then the. What is it? Carbon Capture Unit utilization storage from the Society of Petroleum Engineers and APG and scg. And one of the themes. There are many themes at the Sarah Week, especially as 11,000 speakers, 11,000 guests, hundreds of speakers. And anyway, one of the key themes was AI. But it was not just AI is coming, get used to it. AI is here and it's going to take us from every aspect of energy from what are they, from the reservoir to the boardroom. And that means that when I talk about upstream, midstream and downstream or whatever, that almost doesn't exist. It's a value chain that for ease of being able to process it with our limited tools, we broke it up or whatever. But now that we've got these tools that it's all one thing and we need to be able to think in that holistic point of view. So with your center, Earth energy and the environment, you guys are like there. And I'm guessing that AI is going to be part of your vision there somebody you talk about that just a little bit.
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I'll start with. I'm going to ask Don to fill in. But again, we met in the fall and immediately had shared ideas about how do I get to be introduced to his community, the professionals. And so the opportunity to put together a symposium that would bring together those professionals, what is their relationship to the businesses and those who want to expand economic opportunities in Appalachia. But also again speaking to my job as how do I convey the needs of those professionals to the students and create a graduate who can immediately engage in those opportunities. So there was that, like you said, that tie back to programming, to STEM programming, to managing data. And obviously that has to include the use of AI tools in order for those professionals to do their jobs at the level that's expected in the current practice.
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Yeah, yeah. And Don, the event that you were
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Referring to earlier, Ben asked me, like he said, we met shortly after I joined the board and shortly after he joined Marietta College as the dean. I asked him, I said, what do you need? And so he, he said, look, I really need help to get introduced to your contacts within the energy industry and we need to create this symposium. And I said, what's it look like? He said, we need to, we need to talk about all forms of energy and maybe specifically what we're using here in Appalachia to generate power and energy. We need to understand what, where students are actually at, specifically high school students. Because our objective is to educate people coming out of high school. Of course, we certainly accept transfers into Marietta College, but the majority of our students are going to be fresh out high school. We certainly want, and Ben wants and needs to understand where high school students are actually at. We want to use this event to help drive students and help them understand really what opportunities may look like in the energy energy arena and everything associated with the energy and power arena. Because there's a lot of very good jobs. It certainly is an area of growth, significant growth across the US as you mentioned. AI fits into that picture quite well. I heard one person tell me it's AI is not going to take your job away unless you're not using AI. You got to be up to speed on the AI and how you can actually use it to, to become more efficient in the job that you're doing. My initial thought with regards to the conference was we need to get Scott Tinker to kick this thing off because he is, he talks about all forms of energy and energy poverty around the world and he's traveling around the world to, to pass and give this message. He's a very factual guy. I really respect him because of, he does speak the facts and it's not opinion based conversation. He's, he's obviously got some TED talks out there. He's got many presentations. He's traveling around the US and the world giving presentations. And so we chose to use him to kick off this event and immediately and he's actually going to come in on the 20th to meet with the faculty and the students on campus and we probably will have some high school students present that day as well. And he's going to show his movie Switch on, which is the second movie at the local theater which they've, they've graciously donated to us to and we're opening up to, to the community as far as they can get there.
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Don, let me interrupt you. Sorry, I know you're excited about this and I'm excited, too, and I'm looking forward to be part of it. But let's start from the beginning on your event. What's the name of it and what's the date and where is it?
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So it's going to be April 20th and 21st, and it's energy and Resource Management A Path Forward for Appalachia. That's the title. And really you can break it into two fundamental parts. We've got a panel discussion in the morning and we got a panel discussion roundtable in the afternoon. The panel discussion which immediately follows Scott Tinker's presentation in the morning will be a panel talking about all forms of energy and what's the supply and what's the demand. And we've got leading companies actually coming to speak on this panel. Expand is going to be there to talk about natural gas. We've got Vistra coming to talk about the there's only one or two forms of energy that they don't employ, if you will, with their by through their power generation. Wind is one of those. They certainly use natural gas. They use solar, they use nuclear and they use coal. And those are their primary forms of energy. And we we have a very good speaker coming from Vistra. Expand, like I said, is the is the leading natural gas producer in the U.S. primarily Appalachia. And in the Haynesville in North Louisiana, we have Fervo coming, which is a kind of a their past startup phase and certainly ready for ipo, whereby they will be generating geothermal energy through EGS engineered geothermal systems. We also have Kiewit. Kiewit is the leading manufacturer or construction company, if you will, who's building a lot of these data centers and power plants, specifically power plants. That's one piece of their company. And they've been around since the late 1800s and just continue to grow as a company. And most people want them on their job, so to speak, because they are very good at what they do. That's the morning session. We also have one other person on there. It's actually how you manage the grid, how we new technology that's using AI to actually manage the grid power output. And so it's it's a pretty, pretty exciting company that will introduce an Appalachia, so to speak. And then following that, we've got the Department of Energy coming, John Lassig, who will present to us. He's just recently been assigned to the Department of Energy, but John used to work for me in summer Jay so when I ran the Hydraulic fracturing business in summer. Jay he managed all the technology development and it's probably the best I've ever seen at managing projects and creating value, if you will, for the company that he's working for or the end user, so to speak. And so he, he's, he's now in charge of subsurface R and D for the Department of Energy. And he will be. Three Centers of excellence have been created, one for oil and gas in Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, one for coal in Morgantown, and then one in Idaho for geothermal. And he has center managers, of course, with each one of those. But he's going to be interfacing with academia as well as industry and his centers of excellence to help support what he needs to get done and what specific to the Department of Energy's direction.
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Oh, this is so exciting. Okay, so let me make sure I got this right. We're the center for Earth, Energy and Environment at Marietta College is hosting on April 21 a symposium, an energy symposium, the C E Energy Symposium. And that's the 21st. And that was the agenda that you were describing with all of these speakers. But I think you also said Scott Tinker on the day one. So Scott is on day one, the 20th, April 20th, at Marietta College or Marietta. And then day two is the symposium itself at the college as well. This is huge.
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And Scott Tinker will be there on Tuesday.
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Yeah, he's actually going to speak at the movie theater on Monday, the 20th, and then he'll kick off the meeting on the Tuesday, basically a formal presentation, so to speak. And then we talk about AI immediately after lunch. So we have a leading company coming in next year to talk about how they're using AI in machine learning within their company. We then have another panel discussion roundtable on how we drive business to the Mid Ohio Valley, which is a bit passionate for me since I'm from that area. But it's more of how do we use the molecule, if you will, the natural gas molecule CH4, to create products. We got people coming to talk about ammonia creation and hydrogen, and ultimately some of these do produce CO2. And so we've got a company coming in to talk about what carbon capture and underground storage, dqt. And then we end it with Terry Polish, who's going to talk about the value of a STEM education.
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And of course we know Terry as the immediate past president for Society of Petroleum Engineers. Carbo. Love him. So I'm so glad that he'll be there joining us as well.
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It's very exciting there's something in it for everybody. I met with the Ohio Oil and Gas association there. It was a while back. They graciously decided, they volunteered to advertise it for us. They said, you've got, you got a little bit of everything in there for everybody. We touch upon a lot of things, but our goal really is to get better connected with some of these companies, make sure we're adding value to them, and then ultimately drive students into the energy. Energy industry and, of course, energy. We see energy as a springboard for earth and environment, so to speak. And it's all connected into, for me, it's not all connected into energy, but it's fundamentally a big part of it. And it's Ohio because of, let's say, the Appalachia because of the because the low cost of energy back there, coal, natural gas, primarily nuclear, of course, is growing. It's now become the epicenter for data centers. And so there's we're the number four leading state with regards to data center creation. I think there's 30 to 40 data centers now under construction just in the state of Ohio alone, not to mention Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I don't have those numbers quite yet. I will before we have the seminar, I promise you. No, it's exciting and just the growth. It was just recently announced a fairly large project in Pike County, Ohio, where they're building a 10 gigawatts power plant and data center. And so it's just amazing. It'd be the largest in the world, actually.
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Yes. Oh, my gosh. I want to extend a personal invitation to everyone who wants to attend the symposium on April 21st. I will be moderating the energy panel at 10:45, so be sure that you get there in time for that. But really be great if you could come for the whole event beginning on the 20th with Scott Tinker Day, I guess you would call it. How do people get involved? And how can people get a ticket or how does this work?
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I'd be very happy to talk to anybody who'd be interested. The Marietta College website C eee so Marietta C EEE will get you to our website and by all means, you can find me on that webpage and send me a message, or you can register directly from that link as well.
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Excellent. And we'll include those links in the show notes so that everyone can hear as a podcast. We'll be able to just go below there and register for the event as well. So. Yeah, very exciting. Very exciting. We are almost out of time. Is there anything else you wanted to share or remind about the event. I know that Scott Tinker has a lot of fans around the world for his work with Energy Switch and just as you said, being very factual about energy, helping everyone apply some of their critical analyses to their decisions about how they want to pursue energy, what their personal energy footprint is and the like. So I think it's going to be a really exciting thing And I think Don, you said earlier you're hoping this isn't an annual event. This is the first one.
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Yeah, I think our plans are to have it at least annually. Elena. And we, we, it'll be different topics. Of course. It's, we want to continue to support industry and what industry looks like as we advance. We don't know exactly what you know will be. You know, we certainly took a stab at what companies we want to be supporting by you looking at all forms of energy that may expand to different things as time goes on for sure. And but no, we're extremely happy to, to have just some top notch companies coming and volunteering to, to speak from. We mentioned from Ballarick who's the, they've been in the Ohio I think since 1905 manufacturing steel in the Rust Belt and they're going to come to talk about that. We just got on the Shale Crescent Group which is representing all the different oil and gas companies in the area. Appalachia essentially is the third largest natural gas producer in the world and it's, and I think John's just going to add, Valassi is going to add a very exciting piece to it with regards to, you know, we know that the recovery factor for the unconventional reservoirs is somewhere between 10 and probably 14% somewhere in that range. But John's going to come up with some ideas that's going to take that probably hopefully to the 20% range. And but he's going to, he's going to need academia and industry to help get that done. And so it's with the growing demand for energy, obviously fossil fuels is one of those things that has a limited, limited, it's a limited resource. But you can take your recovery factor from 10 to 20%. It changes the game completely. No, it's just we're going to talk about these things openly and I hope we have a great turnout just because it's, you know, we really want to be talking to future students. We want to drive them to the industry that I've worked in for the last 40 years and just actually I can't really say that I've worked in the industry because it's been so much fun. I don't consider it actually work.
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You don't call it work? Oh, that's great. That's great. And Ben, do you have any last things you want to share?
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I'm just very appreciative of Don and his colleagues. I'm an academic. I'm a career academic. But what I've said from the beginning is I can create any academic program, but that doesn't mean that it serves the needs. It doesn't serve the needs of the students if they can't get a job and it doesn't serve the needs of the industry if they don't inform that curriculum, that process. And so what we're trying to do is to get it right the first time and use our friends and our colleagues in industry to inform that process. And I'm looking forward to doing that for Marietta College going forward.
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Great. Dawn Conkel, Trustee, Board of Directors for Marietta College and Dr. Ben Stewart, Dean, center for Earth, Energy and the Environment. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thanks for hosting us.
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Thank you for having us. Appreciate it.
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And thank you everyone for listening. This is Elena Melkert, your host for Oil and Gas Upstream. More next time.
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Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry.
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If you like this show, leave us
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a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the oil and gas
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Sam.