Dr. Mark Pearson

Bio

Dr. C. Mark Pearson is President and CEO of Liberty Resources LLC, a Denver-based independent operator in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota. With over 40 years in the oil and gas industry, he has authored more than fifty technical papers and holds six patents covering field development, hydraulic fracturing ('fracking'), and oil and gas operations. He earned BS and PhD degrees from the Camborne School of Mines (UK) and completed Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. A Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Distinguished Member, he received the 2018 SPE International Completion Optimization & Technology Award. At the summit he traces the “Shale Revolution” -- how horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing made the United States the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas and, from the 1970s oil shocks to the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, transformed its energy security.

The big questions

The kind of questions this session opens up.

1. The technology that made a nation energy-independent is also the one it argues about most. What does that contradiction tell us?
2. When a breakthrough is both an enormous public good and a real cost to the land, who gets to decide it was worth it?
3. Is energy security a gift one generation gives the next, or a debt it quietly passes down?
4. What do we owe the towns and the ground that power the rest of the country?