Wayne Ackerman, Senior Advisor at Lax Sebenius LLC, with more than 30 years in the global energy industry, Wayne currently provides consulting services across the natural gas value chain. He specializes in opportunity identification, risk identification and mitigation and all aspects of commercial negotiations. He previously held senior roles in Strategy, Corporate Planning and Upstream at Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where he developed their international gas strategy, which was sanctioned by the Saudi Aramco Board and is currently in execution mode. Wayne also worked with Shell in the Hague and Houston in technical and commercial roles spanning the gas value chain. Over his career, Wayne has worked closely with NOCs, IOCs, NGOs, academia, contractors, and various government agencies around the world.

Wayne has led simple transactional negotiations and multi-billion-dollar complex strategic commercial negotiations including engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contracts governing major capital projects, joint venture agreements and associated documents, merger and acquisitions deals, and long-term LNG supply and offtake agreements.

Wayne holds a master’s degree in Geology from The University of Tulsa and a bachelor’s degree in Geology from the University of Colorado Boulder.  He is an Associate Fellow at the Erasmus Commodity and Trade Center, an Adjunct Professor at the CU Denver J.P. Morgan Center for Commodities and Energy Management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School and a member of the advisory council at the Middle East Institute.