Karen Ziegler is an accomplished oil and gas executive with over two decades of experience. As an entrepreneur, she is founder and President of Forth Frame, a boutique social financing firm, centred on corporate sustainability. As an engineer, she’s built innovative solutions to extend the life of capital investments. As a leader, her concern for stakeholder challenges has generated measurable operational cost savings. Ms. Ziegler’s experience is truly global.
Recently, as the Country Advisor for Kazakhstan at Maersk, her focus on relationships and win-win negotiation ensured that the Danish company’s billion dollar investment in the Dunga oil field operated effectively. An engineer with an operators mindset, Karen has repeatedly found cost savings through regulatory negotiations and in lean approaches to project management. In 2015 Karen identified $800M worth of projected capital cost overruns, reworking the execution strategy to bring the expenditure back in line with partner approvals. Her experience in rooting out barriers to efficiency began early on in her career. Her skill in regulatory negotiation resulted in a cost savings of $11M over 18 months on a domestic pipeline project.
Ms. Ziegler’s dedication to professional engineering has resulted in real innovation. In one case, a consortium of upstream experts was awarded $200M in funding to bring Karen’s new approach to dual purposing an offshore platform. Karen recognizes that the industry is as much about people as it is pipelines. She’s championed organizational change management and structure issues during difficult times. Always embracing new opportunity Ms. Ziegler has held leadership roles in domestic midstream pipeline operations to global positions in upstream offshore exploration.
As an active community member, Karen spends time speaking to stakeholder groups on a variety of interdisciplinary oil and gas topics. Her expertise on subjects related to culture, stakeholder relations and change management make her an ideal industry advocate. Ms. Ziegler is also frequently a guest speaker for groups promoting women in STEM, where she spends time mentoring the next generation of female leaders. Outside of the industry, she holds a Director position at the Calgary Performing Arts Festival, where her efforts ensure funding for cultural programming.
Karen holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, and a BSc in Engineering from the University of Calgary.
