Team

Knowledge
Core5G team of seasoned explorationists with tried and true exploration methodology.

Execution
Former Black Gold technical team, used multibeam seep hunting to acquire best blocks offshore Indonesia and leverage potential partners.

Leadership
Executive team with 125+ years experience in oil industry corporate and operations management including Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, restructures.

Our team is a die1445287311488.jpgersified group with deep and extensive energy industry experience. Our Star Management Team includes:

  • Mr. Neal Stanley, CEO & member of Board of Directors, (2011 Wildcatter of the Year, 2009 Inductee into the Rocky Mountain Oil & Gas Hall of Fame, SVP of Forest Oil, CEO of Great Western)
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  • Dr. John Decker, General Manager & member of Board of Directors: served as President and General Manager of Black Gold Energy and was a member of the Board of Directors. After acquisition of Black Gold by Niko Resources, John became the General Manager and Chief Company Representative of Niko Asia, the group responsible for New Ventures in Indonesia. John is an exploration geologist with over 30 years of industry experience, with the USGS, Alaska Geological Survey, ARCO, Unocal, and Chevron. John’s career has focused primarily on regional geology and new ventures, opening new basins and developing new play concepts. He has worked extensively in Alaska and Indonesia. He was involved with State, Federal, and private resource assessments of ANWR and the Alaska North Slope, and was the project geologist for the ARCO Kuvlum discovery and delineation drilling in the Beaufort Sea. He has conducted field programs throughout Indonesia and was the reservoir specialist responsible for delineation of the Tangguh gas discovery in Bintuni Bay. John managed the Regional Team at Unocal and was part of the successful SX exploration team that drilled over 100 wells in the deep water Makassar Strait resulting in several commercial discoveries.
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  • Dr. Dan Orange, Operations Manager-Offshore & member of Board of Directors: served as Vice President – Marine Operations and co-founder of Black Gold Energy; he continued in that capacity after the Niko acquisition. Multi-beam Bathymetry was invented by Dr. Orange’s father, and has been fully developed by Dan while with Black Gold Energy and now practiced as a survey service by ONE LLC, an affiliate of Insight. Dan is a marine geologist with over 15 years of industry experience, as well as academic experience primarily funded by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR). Dan’s academic work combined seafloor mapping and 2D seismic to both find seafloor seeps and interpret their driving mechanisms. His academic work also included ALVIN submersible and ROV dives, and piston cores, to ground-truth seepage. It was during this research that Dan realized that natural hydrocarbon seeps out of the seafloor have a distinctive geophysical/acoustic signature, and he brought that perspective with him to the industry. In addition to seep science, Dan also brought with him an expertise in multibeam (hydrographic) seafloor mapping. Within industry, he applied seep science to hydrocarbon exploration, used process geomorphology to evaluate deep-water geohazards, and applied his knowledge of survey and navigation systems to enable the successful commercialization of Controlled Source Electro-Magnetics (CSEM). Dan has been involved with seep surveys for industry offshore Brazil, Trinidad, Barbados, Morocco, Ghana, India, Turkey, Ecuador, the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and Indonesia. Dan was the CEO of AOA Geophysics until the time he joined Black Gold Energy in 2005.

  • Dr. Phil Teas, Exploration Manager & member of Board of Directors: served as Vice President and Chief Geologist for Black Gold Energy; he continued in that capacity after the Niko acquisition. He has over 15 years of industry experience with Unocal, Chevron and Black Gold/Niko. His entry to industry was as a structural geologist focused on fault seal analysis. He provided structural geology support for international efforts in Columbia, Argentina, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia as well as in the Gulf of Mexico. Phil moved to Indonesia in 2001 and shifted focus to Southeast Asia, adding the Philippines, Australia, and Timor Leste to his areas of support. Phil also split his time with exploration operations in Indonesia, participating in drilling exploration and appraisal wells in the Kutei Exploration program at Unocal. Prior to joining Black Gold, Phil oversaw the effort to define step out exploration around the planned Gendalo and Gandang field developments. Phil was the main geological interface with the Niko drilling program in Indonesia and responsible for the geological evaluation of the new wells.

  • Dr. Mark E. Odegard, Ph.D., EVP, Chief Geoscientist & member of Board of Directors: Geophysics & Geology (Unocal, Sohio, GETECH, CORE 5G GROUP, Griz Geo)
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  • Mr. John King, 58, President & Co-Founder Insight Exploration LLC, a company formed to unite a group of partners with the common goal of building a significant new independent oil exploration and production company. John is the Co-Founder of NexGen Exploration, LLC (a geophysical technology development company and oil project developer) and the Founder and CEO of King Resources, LLC (predecessor to NexGen). Mr. King is the son of legendary wildcatter John McCandish King of King Resources Company, a public company during the 1960’s and 1970’s. NexGen Exploration, LLC, in addition to developing a Tool Kit of geophysical technology and proprietary tools, is a prospect generator with an extensive inventory of oil and gas projects. John and his family have a long history of investments in the upstream and downstream sectors of the oil and gas industry. Mr. King was the Founder and a Managing Director of LBO firm CEO Equity Partners, LLC and venture capital firm UniFi Capital Partners, LLC. His brother and brother-in- law are the founding partners of Denver based LBO firm KRG Capital Partners, LLC ($4.2 billion under management) for which John contributes as acquisition prospect generator. John was the former President of American Resources Company (1988-1992), a company successfully engaged in horizontal drilling of the Austin Chalk Formation in Texas and made two Minnelusa Formation new oil field discoveries in Wyoming. Mr. King’s oil discovery track record exceeds 25 million barrels of oil.
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  • Mr. Kelly T. Hickel, Executive VP-Finance & member of Board of Directors; has been a senior executive for over three decades. Many of his successes were in the technology industry and focused on turnarounds of troubled companies. He subsequently has extensive experience in oilfield service companies as well as downstream operations and all manner of retail purveyors. He managed and restructured, grew or sold companies from $600 million in revenue. Mr. Hickel was the turn-around President to Miniscribe Corp., a troubled Fortune 500 $600 million annual revenue disk drive manufacturer. He was the President of the Maxwell Technology Information Systems Group from 1993 until 1997, during which, Maxwell was the 9th best performing stock on NASDAQ and the #1 performing stock in California in 1996. Mr. Hickel was Chairman and Chief Restructuring Office of The Tyree Company in Farmingdale, New York, the largest oil downstream services company in the northeast. Mr. Hickel has been a financial and business advisor to many companies including oilfield services companies in the Permian, Unita and Baaken basins. Mr. Hickel has arranged a number of private and public company financings and financial restructurings over the years and has raised and/or returned over a $1 billion to investors and lenders in his career. He has served in every C-level management role in both public and private companies.
    Mr. Kelly Hickel

  • Rodney G. Blackford, Country Manager, Founder Two Olive Trees LLC., Developer of Blackford Refraction Method of seismic processing; expert in Under-Balanced Drilling; 40 yrs. Served as Personal Consultant to DMD, Exploration Manager Kuwait Oil Company, PMEX Northern Region Director, and Two Olive Trees, LLC. Discovered over 100 million barrels of oil and/or gas equivalent in his career. Generated Prospects Integrating Basin Modeling, Structural History Evaluation, Oil Migration Studies, Stratigraphic Sequencing Integration, Geological modeling, Geophysical Analysis, Petrophysical Analysis and other prospect specific data. Mr. Blackfield has evaluated more than 220 exploration and production projects and is a recognized expert on advanced seismic acquisition, processing and interpretation, and has successfully applied Under-balanced Drilling (UBD) Exploration. Domestic and international hands on experience and contacts, serving as consultanting geophysicist and educator.
  • Paul Wiesner, Chief Financial Officer & member of Board of Directors, CFO Tracker Resources Development II; CFO Storm Can Energy; CFO Emerald Oil (EOX); 30 years, all of Denver, Colorado, where his responsibilities included lease acquisition, capital raises, mergers/acquisitions/sales of companies up to $1 billion, including operational budgeting, financing, equity offerings and debt structuring. Experienced in successfully growing companies and creating the financial infrastructure and coordination of legal, financial, insurance and administrative stakeholders. Experienced in large-scale lease acquisitions, convertible debt structure, and preferred equity offerings. MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management 1997.

Our team Exploration has one mission: to create stakeholder wealth through oil exploration. We do this sequentially, with project play and prospect generation, due diligence, acreage acquisition, hi-tech work programs, prospect ranking & seriatim, drilling, assessing & appraising the discovery and subsequently monetizing it. The greatest rate of value creation occurs where an investment’s maximum valuation is attained for the least amount of capital. Once a discovery is made, we appraise it & capitalize on our investment by monetizing it. This disciplined turnover supports renewed exploration investment organically, providing new capital for the next cycle of wealth creation.

The following are aspects and attributes of our team and its Management:

  • Portfolio of project activity focused on Mediterranean Offshore and Onshore
  • Extensive oil project portfolio evaluations throughout the Mediterranean Region
  • Over 250 years of experience in oil and gas and other industries
  • Extensive experience in exploration both offshore and onshore
  • Extensive experience in Indonesia offshore, Gulf Coast Region, Rocky Mountains Region and around the World
  • Insight Predecessor company Black Gold Energy (“BGE”) founded and operated by Decker, Orange and Teas n 2006 raised $96.3 million from Goldman Sachs 
  • Insight Predecessor company Black Gold Energy (“BGE”) founded and operated by Decker, Orange and Teas n 2006 raised $96.3 million from Goldman Sachs and another investor for offshore Indonesia and sold to Niko in 2009
  • BGE was the largest holder of Concession Rights for Offshore Indonesia in 2009.
  • Group has raised and returned billions of dollars of debt and investment capital (Kelly Hickel alone is over $1.1B)
  • Decades of technology experience dedicated to positioning us and one of the most advanced technology based exploration companies
  • BGE performed, and now Decker, Orange and Teas industry service company Oro Negro Exploration LLC (“ONE”) provide, Multi-beam Bathometry for scanning the sea floor for structures and oil seeps for the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, and also conduct SeaSeep Coring for confirmation of oil seeps (clients include super major oil companies)
  • Extensive geology and geophysical knowledge based portfolio
  • Global experience
  • Deep experience in management from downstream, to exploration to oilfield services to production
  • Neal Stanley “2011 Wildcatter of the Year”
  • Relationships in all phases of the industry
  • Deep and wide relationships in the financial community of lenders and investors
  • Sterling reputations individually and collectively
  • Family with over sixty years in the exploration business with (John McCandish King, Father of Our team’s John M. King IV is the first Oil Legend of the Rockies, Founder/Chairman/CEO of King Resources Company of the 1950s-1970s, 1969 Wildcatter of the Year); John M. King IV grew up learning the oil business from his father, and has had specific projects to pursue many gained from his Father.
  • Relationships with almost all successful energy business individuals in Denver and elsewhere