
Ivan Sandrea
Co-founder & CEO, Westlawn Americas Offshore
Ivan is CEO of Westlawn Americas Offshore, a private upstream company that is investing responsibly in high-quality deepwater assets in different stages of development with leading players and operators. Prior to this Ivan was founder and former CEO of Sierra Oil & Gas, a blue-chip PE backed company (Riverstone, Encap, Blackrock), and one the most successful new exploration stories in recent years. In 2022, Ivan was a Board member and an advisor to Havfram, a Norwegian offshore services company backed by HitecVision, and was responsible for the sourcing and sale of the wind business to Sandbrook. Over the past 25 years, Ivan has held several entrepreneurial, leadership, and corporate roles including Co-head of the global energy practice for EY, President of Energy Intelligence, and Vice President of Corporate and Upstream Strategy and Business Development at Statoil (now Equinor). At Equinor, Ivan played a leading role in the strategy re-set, corporate planning and in the origination of business development and M&A efforts from 2007 to 2011. Prior to this Ivan held other roles such as head of oil supply at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), investment banker at Merrill Lynch and geologist at BP in Venezuela, Norway, and Egypt. During his career Ivan also held various non-executive roles (International Advisor to JX Nippon in Tokyo, Petra Energia in Brazil, and Pan Andean Resources).
Ivan is an active member of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES), the Oxford Energy Policy Club, trustee of the Energy Policy Research Foundation (EPRINC) at Washington D.C. and a regular guest at the Global Business Policy Council of Kearney. Ivan’s academic activities include co-founder and lecturer at the Executive Energy MBA program at Wirtschaftsuniversität (WU) in Vienna, lecturer at the Executive Energy Program at ITAM, Mexico’s leading university, and authorship of over 20 research papers and books. Ivan holds a BSc in Geology from Baylor University, an MSc and MBA from Edinburgh University and attended the Berkeley Executive Leadership Program at Stanford University.