Management Team

Dr. Bernard Duroc-Danner is an internationally recognized energy executive, having built Weatherford International Ltd. and Grant Prideco, two global market and industry leaders whose growth was driven through hundreds of focused acquisitions around the world. Dr. Duroc-Danner started EVI, Inc. (NYSE: EVI), an oilfield service and equipment company in May 1987, for which he served as Chairman, President and CEO until he retired in 2016, and upon retirement was given the distinction of Chairman Emeritus of Weatherford, EVI’s successor company. 

Dr. Duroc-Danner started EVI with no product lines, operations or business and very limited financial resources. Over time and with the benefit of over 250 industrially concentric acquisitions and continuous development, EVI built two industrial leaders: Grant Prideco (NYSE: GRP) and subsequent to the acquisition of Weatherford Enterra in 1998, Weatherford International Ltd. (NYSE: WFT), which also became the successor name to EVI. In recognition of the industrial buildup and value created, the original EVI stock split in four separate events 32 to one. By the time Dr. Duroc-Danner retired, he had built Weatherford through hundreds of acquisitions into one of the largest energy service companies in the world with approximately 50,000 employees and operating in over 100 countries. Concurrently, in 2000, after more than a decade of building it through a series of transactions, EVI through its successor company, Weatherford, spun out Grant Prideco, the industry’s worldwide leader for drill pipe and drill stem accessories, as a dividend to its shareholders. It represented more than a third of Weatherford’s traded market equity value at that time. Subsequent to the spin-off, Dr. Duroc-Danner served as Chairman of Grant Prideco until 2003. Grant Prideco was sold a few years later to National Oilwell Varco (NYSE: NOV) for an enterprise value of approximately $7.5 billion, creating substantial value for Weatherford shareholders.

Dr. Duroc-Danner was named as Outstanding Texas Entrepreneur by the Texas House of Representatives (2011) and was the Ernst and Young recipient of the Worldwide Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Energy and Chemicals Industry in 2008.

Dr. Duroc-Danner received his MBA and a PhD degree from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Gustafson is a highly experienced energy service industry executive, investment banker, and corporate securities attorney. With over 25 years of experience in the global energy sector, Mr. Gustafson has advised on over 100 corporate transactions around the world for over $100 billion of transaction value. 

Mr. Gustafson began his career as a corporate and securities attorney in 1992, holding positions at the international law firms of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton and Baker Botts L.L.P. He continued his career in investment banking, holding various positions at Simmons & Company International, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Investment Bank before serving as Managing Director and Head of the Energy Group, Americas at Deutsche Bank from 2009 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014, Mr. Gustafson was Chief Executive Officer and Director of Era Group Inc. (previously NYSE: ERA), where he led the successful spin out of Era from Seacor Holdings in January 2013. From 2017 to 2018, Mr. Gustafson served as a member of the Founding Steering Committee created by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia to establish a private commercial helicopter operator (The Helicopter Company) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. From 2017 to 2019, Mr. Gustafson served as a director at CHC Helicopter. Since 2018, he has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the publicly traded Norwegian company, Golden Energy Offshore (GEOS.ME.Oslo), a fully integrated shipowner and operator of offshore service vessels for the global offshore wind industry as well as the oil and gas industry. Since 2020, Mr. Gustafson has also served as an independent director for Western Rare Earths, the U.S. subsidiary of Australian rare earth mining company, American Rare Earths (ASX: ARR), providing critical materials for electric vehicles, wind turbines, and other renewable energy technology. 

Mr. Gustafson earned a B.A. in English from Rice University and earned a Juris Doctor (magna cum laude—top 1%) from the University of Houston Law Center.

From 2010 to 2020 Mr. Major worked with National Oilwell Varco (NYSE: NOV), initially in engineering, supply chain, sales, operations, and management roles.  The latter five years at NOV he spent as Director of Corporate Development, assessing over 500 deals and leading multiple energy services and technology transactions to closure. Mr. Major also developed a comprehensive strategy to grow NOV’s business in renewable energy, which included mapping the renewable energy supply chain and technology landscape, pursuing dozens of potential acquisitions and investments, and driving internal product developments.  

Since departing NOV in 2020, Mr. Major has provided consulting and advisory services to companies and investors operating in wind, solar, and energy storage.  Mr. Major is also a Managing Partner at MB Energy Partners, which sponsors lower/middle-market private investments in renewable energy companies.

Mr. Major earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta.

Mr. Karsner is a leading corporate innovation strategist and accomplished energy entrepreneur, policymaker, regulator and diplomat with more than three decades of global conventional

and renewable energy experience, spanning every natural resource. He is Senior Strategist at X (formerly Google X), the innovation lab of Alphabet Inc., where he is part of the executive leadership team, shaping strategy for technology, policy, and commercialization at the nexus of natural resources and AI, machine learning, geospatial engineering, and high performance computing. He began his career developing large-scale energy infrastructure and has led or contributed to project development, management and finance enabling significant value creation on six continents. As a private equity investor, venture partner and advisor, his portfolios have included some of the most successful clean tech startups of the past decade, including Nest (AI), Tesla (mobility), Recurrent (solar), Codexis (biotech) and Carbon (3D printing). From 2005 to 2008, Mr. Karsner served as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Efficiency and Renewable Energy of the United States, managing the approximately $2 billion annual federal applied science, research

and development portfolio. Mr. Karsner exercised a discrete diplomatic and security role as a principal representative of the United States in the negotiations on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other bilateral energy and environmental technology accords. From 2016 to 2019, Mr. Karsner served as Managing Partner of Emerson Collective, an investment platform funding non-profit, philanthropic and for-profit portfolios advancing education, health, immigration, the environment, and other initiatives. Along with Emerson’s Founder and Principal, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mr. Karsner co-founded Emerson Elemental (since spun out as Elemental Labs) with a deep focus on market-based solutions and technologies addressing conservation and climate change. 

Mr. Karsner is Executive Chairman of Manifest Energy, an energy technology development and investment firm he founded in 2008. Earlier in his career, from 1999 to 2006, Mr. Karsner was Founder and Managing Director of Enercorp, a private company involved in international project development, management, and financing of clean and sustainable energy infrastructure. Enercorp was international agent and partner to Vestas and a pioneer in large scale wind power plant design and development. He has also worked with Tondu Energy Systems of Texas, Wartsila Power Development of Finland, and other

multi-national energy firms and developers managing a wide array of conventional and renewable sources of energy.

Mr. Karsner was recently elected to the Board of Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM), and has served on the Board of Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT), a leading semiconductor equipment company, since 2008. He has also served as a director of numerous privately held companies and nonprofit organizations, including Conservation International. He is a Precourt Energy Scholar at Stanford University’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and serves on the Schultz-Stephenson Energy Task Force at the Hoover Institution, and has been an Associate at Harvard’s Kennedy School addressing the geopolitics of energy technology. H.M. King Carl Gustav of Sweden knighted Mr. Karsner as “Royal Commander of the Polar Star” for his role in advancing European-US technology collaboration. 

Mr. Karsner holds a BA with honors from Rice University and an MA from Hong Kong University.

Mr. Chen is the Founder and Managing Partner of Carnegie Park Capital, a SPAC-dedicated investment firm based in New York. Mr. Chen has over 13 years of experience in public market investing including across capital structure, geographies, and industries. Prior to founding Carnegie Park Capital, Mr. Chen was a Portfolio Manager at Water Island Capital, which he joined in 2013 and where he led the firm’s long-short equity portfolios and SPAC investments. Prior to joining Water Island Capital, Mr. Chen was a Managing Director and led the U.S. Event-Driven Strategy effort at Jefferies, which he joined in 2009. Between 2007 and 2009, Mr. Chen was a core member at Citigroup’s Event-Driven trading desk which was responsible for due diligence in merger arbitrage and SPAC investments. Mr. Chen started his career in finance at Citigroup in the firm’s Media & Telecom Investment Banking group where he assisted in over $18 billion worth of M&A transactions. 

Mr. Chen received an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and a BSE from the University of Pennsylvania.