Carole Nakhle

Founder and CEO, Crystol Energy

Carole Nakhle is the founder and CEO of Crystol Energy. She is an international authority on global energy issues, in particular in the fields of hydrocarbon finance, market development, policy, governance, regulation, fiscal regimes, and contractual arrangements. With a unique breadth of experience spanning different stakeholders in the oil and gas industry around the world, Nakhle has worked with oil and gas companies (Eni and Statoil) at the executive level, governments and policymakers (including special parliamentary advisor in the United Kingdom), international organizations, academic institutions, and specialized think tanks on a global scale. She is active on the governing board of the Natural Resource Governance Institute and is a member of its audit and finance committee, and sits on the advisory boards of IKAR Industries and the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. Nakhle is a program advisor to the Washington-based International Tax and Investment Center, lead energy expert with the Geopolitical Intelligence Services, and a member of the Executive Sessions on the Political Economy of Extractive Industries at Columbia University in New York. She is also involved in the OECD Policy Dialogue on Natural Resource-Based Development and has contributed to the development of the organization’s Principles for Durable Extractive Contracts. In addition to her commercial role, Nakhle lectures at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, the European University Institute in Italy, Saint Joseph University in Lebanon, and the NATO Strategic Direction South Hub in Italy. Nakhle founded the not-for-profit organization Access for Women in Energy in 2007, with the aim of supporting the development of women in the energy sector globally. She has also supported the development of similar initiatives in Ghana, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates, where she sits on ADIPEC’s advisory board for inclusion and diversity. Her views on energy matters have appeared in numerous articles in academic journals, newspapers, and magazines. She is an avid commentator on energy and geopolitics in the international media and major conferences and industry gatherings in many countries. She has appeared on Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, France 24, and Sky News, among others. She is the executive editor and author of Newsweek’s special edition “New Technological Frontiers in the Oil and Gas Industry.” She has published two widely acclaimed books: Petroleum Taxation: Sharing the Wealth (2008) and Out of the Energy Labyrinth (2007), co-authored with David Howell, former U.K. secretary of state for energy. In 2017, she gave evidence to the International Relations Committee at the U.K. Parliament on oil markets, the transformation of power in the Middle East, and implications for U.K. policy. Nakhle received the 2017 Honorary Professional Recognition Award from the Tunisian minister of energy, mines, and renewable energy.

The Geopolitics of Oil and Gas and U.S.-Gulf Arab Relations

As part of the sixth annual Petro Diplomacy conference, AGSIW hosted a virtual panel discussion on the geopolitics of oil.

Petro Diplomacy 2020

For the sixth consecutive year, AGSIW convened its Petro Diplomacy conference, this year virtually.