Dr. Ghasem Bayat

Bio

Dr. Ghasem Bayat is a petroleum engineer, scientist, and educator whose career in energy spans more than five decades. Holding a Ph.D. in engineering, he has worked on petroleum reservoir projects across many of the world’s major oil- and gas-producing basins and in numerous countries, earning wide recognition in his field and authoring numerous technical papers in engineering journals. He is the founder and chief executive of New Dawn Energy, an independent oil-and-gas company based in Houston, Texas, and the founder and president of Mines Power, an environmental energy company in the same city. Across a lifetime of technical and executive leadership, he has sought to run business and operations in a way that joins environmental responsibility and a high standard of ethics with the creation of wealth for all concerned. For more than two decades he has spoken on radio, on television, and at technical, social, and business conferences on responsible energy production and conservation, renewable energy, environmental sustainability, the roots of poverty, and social development. As the summit’s lead organizer, his long view of supply and demand anchors his talk on the history and future of energy.

The big questions

The kind of questions this session opens up.

1. Nearly every leap in human freedom has been, underneath, a leap in available energy. Why do we still treat energy as just a line on a bill?
2. If energy is the hidden currency of civilization, what does it say about us that we still can’t agree on how to spend it?
3. Can we power a fair and growing world without asking some people to stay poor so others can stay comfortable?
4. A century from now, will the way we make energy today look like progress, or like something we should have known better than to do?