Tom Blades Drives Siemens Oil & Gas Division Into World-Class Player

One could justifiably say that the job of CEO of Siemens’ fledgling but fast-growing Oil & Gas Division was designed specifically for Tom Blades.

Before he named to head the division in January, Blades, 52, had already spent 30 years working for service company giants Schlumberger and Halliburton in key executive positions. Most recently he had spent the past four years as president/CEO of Choren Industries, a German-based company that produces renewable energy.

AS you’ll learn through this interview with Blades, an energy career may not have been his original plan, but he happens to be the right person at the right time to move Siemens Oil & Gas Division into the upper tier of world-class energy service companies. One success for the Erlangen, Germany-based company came in May when it announced an order for the first carbon-neutral pipeline compressors in the U.S. as part of El Paso’s Ruby Pipeline Project.

P&GJ: Where did you grow up and what were your interests as a young man?
Blades: I grew up in the southwest of England, just outside Plymouth on the edge of Dartmoor: wild ponies, moors and of course the sea, a great place even today. My school was a typical British grammar school, a little like Harry Potter’s school but perhaps a little more modern. We all wore blazers and ties and called the teachers “Sir”. It was, of course, an ‘all-day school’ where, in addition to the standard curricula, we learned to sail, shoot guns and fly. My father was a marine engineer and when I was 14 his work took us to Belgium. Having checked out the British School of Brussels I decided to stay where I was in Plymouth and so began a long series of holiday commutes, at first to Brussels, then Singapore, Louisiana and Taipei. By 18 I had seen a good part of the world.

P&GJ: Why did you decide on a career in the energy industry?
Blades: I studied engineering in Salford, England and in Lyon, France. It was while I was in Lyon, more through coincidence than anything else, that I landed in the energy business. As is customary in the final year, recruiter held presentations at the university. My friends convinced me to attend the Schlumberger presentations, not out of interest, but because it was rumored that Schlumberger had the best buffet. The prerequisite was sitting through a 30-minute presentation followed by a 45-minute film about oil and gas exploration. It showed far-off places, jungles, deserts and rigs out on the ocean and above all, the role of technology and the Schlumberger field engineer - that was it - I was hooked.

P&GJ: What path led to your position with Siemens Oil & Gas Division?
Blades: I was 21 when I began working in the oil and gas industry. Today I’m 52 - that’s 31 years of preparation for my role as the Siemens Oil & Gas CEO. In that time I have seen those parts of the oil and gas world I missed in my youth. I have worked upstream to downstream and refining, even some time in renewables, all in all a pretty rounded background for the job at hand. The invitation to come to Siemens came from Wolfgang Dehen, Chief of Siemens Energy. Initially I took a little persuading, after all, Siemens wasn’t exactly an established player in the oil and gas industry, but precisely the opportunity to change this is what motivated me in accepting this challenge.