Mark Dingley

Mark Dingley is a board-level senior leader with a background in mining and on-shore/off-shore oil & gas industries. Throughout his career, Mark has demonstrated increasing levels of technical, financial, and decision-making authority, as well as a proven track record of establishing high-performance teams, often in challenging multicultural environments. His personal core values focus on delivering carefully branded, cost-effective, efficient, and sustainable results. He has accumulated extensive experience working with government bodies up to and including heads of governments and heads of states.

Mark is a published author and served as the President of Africa Oil (Ethiopia) and Vice President of Operations at Africa Oil Corp. As part of the senior leadership team, he was accountable for the strategic direction and operational delivery of an asset portfolio stretching the length of the African Rift Valley in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Northern Somalia. He safely delivered large-scale, multi-disciplinary operations on time and budget within a complex Joint Venture and challenging regulatory frameworks, resulting in the discovery of a >600MM barrel oil resource. Mark was instrumental in the successful and historic first lifting of crude oil from East Africa via the port of Mombasa, and orchestrated the design of the Kenyan crude oil export pipeline.

Prior to serving as President of Africa Oil (Ethiopia), Mark served as the Vice President Middle East at Talisman Energy and was accountable for exploration activities in the Kurdish region of Iraq and JV operations in Oman and Qatar. He was responsible for a total annual CAPEX of $400MM and OPEX of $200MM, and delivered several seismic acquisition programs and multi-string drilling operations adding >400MM barrels liquid & 3TCF gas resources at a finding cost of <$1.5/boe. He also served as the Vice President Latin America at Talisman Energy, where he acquired a portfolio of eight license blocks in the Amazon Basin and was accountable for $300MM/year exploration OPEX. He established both project and corporate-level compliance standards relevant to IFC, ILO, Equator Principles & various United Nations guidelines and compliant with host government legislation, with a keen focus on recognition and respect for indigenous people’s rights.

In addition to his previous roles, Mark has held positions as the Manager of Corporate Risk at Talisman Energy, the Deputy General Manager (Sudan) at Talisman Energy, the Mine Development Manager at Tenke-Fungurume in Lundin Group, and the Company Representative at Occidental Petroleum. He began his early career in various roles in the British Government.

Mark holds a Law degree (LLB) and an Economics Master’s degree from Canterbury, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a PhD in Applied Economics from Wharton Business School. He is a certified UK Offshore Installation Manager (OIM) and an associate member of the International Bar Association. He is proficient in Spanish and French, a competent Arabic and Swahili speaker, and has a working knowledge of several additional languages. Mark is also a perpetual student of development economics and game theory, a keen technical scuba diver, a chess player, and a rugby fanatic.