Experience

Artesia EcoScience LLC

• United States
• Oil and Gas
• 1 - 100 Employee

• CEO

  • Jan 2016 - Present

  Artesia EcoScience LLC is a water treatment and oilfield chemistry company based in San Angelo and Houston, Texas. The company's initial thrust is the offering of chlorine dioxide treatment of frac water in the Permian Basin and the treatment of produced water for its reuse as frac water in subsequent fracking operations. Frac water sources can be either untreated fresh or brackish water or treated produced and flowback water or other sources of waste water. With its own equipment and personnel, Artesia can chemically treat flowing fresh or produced water used at the well site in the fracking process prior to it entering the working tanks and blender (so called “on-the-fly” frac water treatment). The company can also provide what the industry refers to as “full reuse projects” for produced water at locations off the well site involving water filtration, weir tanks, flocculants, chemical treatment with oxidizing or non-oxidizing biocides and centrifuges. This process allows a portion of the flowback and produced water to be re-cycled rather than sent to a disposal well. The three owners/managers of Artesia previously worked at Tetra Technologies. Joe Abell was the CFO of Tetra for 11 years and is a mechanical engineer by background; Ric Termine is a PhD chemist who ran Tetra's water business and research lab; and Dennis Naeger is a chemical engineer who was in charge of sales and business development for Tetra's water business and spent a number of years in the water treatment and production chemicals businesses with Nalco Champion and GE Betts. The fourth key manager has extensive experience constructing, maintaining and operating trailer-mounted chemical injection equipment, stationary water treatment plants and tank batteries. The fifth key manager has extensive sales management experience in the Permian Basin. Additional information on Artesia is provided on its website at www.artesia-ecoscience.com.



Entropy Modulation LLC

• Houston, Texas

• President

  • 2012 - Dec 2015

  Entropy Modulation LLC, established in 2012, provides acquisition, financial, strategic and business process enhancement advisory services to private equity investors and owner/entrepreneurs of oilfield service and oil & gas exploration and production companies. In addition, the company seeks its own investment opportunities in the energy industry and is backed by potential investors with specific investment objectives. Entropy Modulation provides the value-added services typically expected of a high quality CEO or CFO as well as the insights of a trusted board member. A small business owner may be seeking advice on growing his business, making it more scalable or making it more attractive to lenders or private equity firms. Alternatively, a PE firm may be seeking to make its recently acquired portfolio company more professional and sustainable, in which case it will want to support the management team in understanding how and why they are succeeding or failing at capturing and executing jobs, in understanding and monitoring the leading and lagging performance indicators of the business, and in understanding and addressing the key issues and opportunities that enable sustainable growth and create value. Entropy Modulation is capable of developing or providing the financial and administrative capabilities of a multi-billion dollar company to small firms who cannot afford such an infrastructure. For established operators and large international companies with small U.S. footprints, we can provide supplemental services to enhance acquisition and development programs and to make business processes better, faster and less expensive. Our goal is to provide financial, development and strategic services to help customers maximize investment value and optimize business processes ….In other words, we are “adding structure to concepts." See www.entropymodulationllc.com for service offerings, clients and more.



TETRA Technologies, Inc.

• United States
• Oil and Gas
• 700 & Above Employee

• Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

  • May 2001 - Jul 2012

  From 2001 to 2012, Mr. Abell was the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of TETRA Technologies, Inc., a publicly traded oilfield service company involved in completion fluids, well testing, compression services, various offshore services including well plug & abandonment and platform decommissioning, and, until its divestment, an oil & gas production company. He has comprehensive financial leadership experience in raising and allocating capital, MLP and IPO structuring and execution, building out financial organizations and scalable business processes, strategic planning, M&A execution, accounting/ERP and business intelligence implementations, risk management, financial reporting, governance and controls, tax and investor relations. In addition, Mr. Abell had 8 years of M&A and strategic planning experience at Tenneco and Transco and 17 years of sales, marketing, business/project development, asset management and plant engineering experience at Shell, Tenneco, Transco, BG and Sithe/Marubeni, including 7 years of international experience and more than 5 years of start-up company experience on several ventures. Mr. Abell has played a leadership role in more than 30 M&A transactions totaling in excess of $12 billion. Mr. Abell's experience spans an array of oil and gas service, oil and gas exploration & production, electric power generation, gas pipeline gathering and transmission, chemical manufacturing, marine vessel and diving operations, and marine construction businesses across US and international markets, in addition to survey knowledge of alternative energy technologies. Mr. Abell has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and a MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was a four year letterman on the Cornell Varsity tennis team. Mr. Abell serves, or has served, on various for-profit, civic, and professional association boards.