Jeremy O’Brien is the Segment Director for Energy at Seequent, based in Ōtautahi-Christchurch, New Zealand. Born and educated in Christchurch, the awesome power of the North Island’s geothermal energy struck him as a boy on a family holiday to the geysers in Rotorua and again later, as a university student, standing on a geothermal drilling rig for the first time.
We caught up with him recently to get to know him better.
Hi Jeremy, nice to meet you. Just to start, what brought you to Seequent?
We’d been living in London, doing the Kiwi OE. I was at Halliburton, and my wife and I made the decision to move closer to home. I saw the Seequent job advert come out on LinkedIn and I knew about Leapfrog because Mercury, who I used to work for, had tested it in the early days. And there was a specific role around geothermal. I chucked my name in the ring and, lo and behold, as we were leaving London, driving around Europe, I agreed to join the company. And I ended up where I am today.
What excites you about your work?
I’ve always been incredibly interested in energy and how energy impacts society and what it does, and we’re in a pretty unique position to be supporting most of the world’s geothermal power generation. It’s a really cool thing to get up in the morning and work with the largest energy companies on the planet down to individual geothermal consultants. The second thing is people. It’s important to be around a group of people you enjoy and you have the ability to ask questions of. The culture and the people are good. There’s a lot of like-minded people here motivated by trying to do things in a better way and intrinsically interested in how complex systems link together.
Jeremy O’Brien, Seequent’s Segment Director for Energy
What changes have you seen at Seequent?
I’ll have been here nine years in October. I think I was employee number 156 or something. The company has grown immensely. I’ve seen the products change, I’ve seen the way we operate change – we’ve made acquisitions, we’ve added capabilities, we’re part of a bigger company as a part of Bentley Systems. Seeing the company grow up and mature is what’s really cool. We’ve always been driven by our customer base, but we’ve taken leaps and brought industries with us too. A great example is having Volsung as a part of the Seequent family – bringing fully coupled reservoir and surface facilities modelling to the geothermal industry and scaling it has been really exciting to watch. We continue to change the way people work.
How has technology shaped your career?
When I was a geologist at Mercury, I used to draw cross-sections in CorelDRAW. We had one 3D-modeller using one specific piece of software. I first started geomodelling at Halliburton as part of my role there, then I joined Seequent and picked up the tools with more rigour. I was training people and demonstrating the software all the time – it was full steam ahead. So, I just think that technology has become more synonymous with day-to-day life. It’s just become mainstay to have these technologies, because people realise how important they are to the bottom line of their organisations. It’s not just a nice-to-have, it’s become more of a must-have.
What’s your best tip for keeping up with the pace of change?
You’ve just got to be willing to adapt and to learn. Look at the AI race we have going on right now. I’d say, even personally, I should be investing a lot more time in that, because things are changing so drastically. The biggest thing is just to be open-minded, because I think if you’re not always learning, and not always looking at new things, you very quickly lose the frame of vision of what’s actually happening in the world. Put time aside to go and play with things. If you think of generational technology change, when my family bought our first proper personal computer, it was like “don’t break it”, “whatever you do, don’t push these buttons”. But nowadays it’s like, push it as hard as you can, find out what you can do and learn. That’s the key to success.
What is the most useful thing you studied at university?
I was always interested in water and the interaction with the Earth. Towards the end of my undergraduate degree in geology at Canterbury University, the late Professor Jim Cole, one of my mentors, got me to come away on a volcanology field trip to the North Island. It was the first time I’d been on a drilling rig and all of a sudden I could see this pathway to something that was incredibly interesting, and what was cool is it was adjacent enough to a big industry like oil and gas but fascinatingly in renewables and power generation. It became very clear to me that there were these industries out there which you could solve quite complex problems for and actually have a societal impact as well.
Any career lowlights you’d care to share?
That’s a good question. The things I regret most are where there were opportunities that I wasn’t able to make the most of. One of my biggest regrets is not going to study in the US for six months while I was at university and getting that experience. Another opportunity I missed that I still rue to this day is that when you’re drilling, you have company people on site who are representing the organisation doing the drilling. The team wanted me to be the night company person who does that graveyard shift and you are in charge of all of that. But I couldn’t take up that opportunity because of how busy we were.
What do you do away from work?
Like a lot of people here, I’m a relatively competitive person, but I have a young family, three kids all under six, so that keeps me really busy. Sport was a core part of who I am growing up – I’m the classic Kiwi who loves rugby and cricket. But mountain biking has become my vice – I love getting up the Port Hills and mountain biking. I run when I can but that’s more of a chore. I’m a social person, so just like being around the people I want to be around.
Coffee or tea?
Tea – gumboot, black.
Oh, we’ll have to change the name of this column then!
OK, books or podcasts? Fiction or non-fiction?
Errr … this is a complex one. I’d like to read more books – I should read more books! But where I find myself more is podcast. I tend to listen while I work or listen while I’m doing something to try and engage my brain in other things. Even if you’re not quite engaged with it, you’re still hearing it.
Non-fiction. I like to keep up with what’s going on in the world, keep up with the sports side of things because that’s always interesting. I like to be aware of politics without it ruling my life.
What’s a piece of technology you’ve bought recently?
OK, so this is a double whammy. I bought a Garman watch and my wife bought me a pair of Bluetooth ear pods, and it’s been game changing for me fitness-wise, because it’s given me something where I can compete better with myself because my watch tells me when I haven’t done enough exercise. The combination of that watch and the headphones has been great for my motivation.
Many thanks for your time, Jeremy. Lovely to meet you.
Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn here
* Jeremy holds a Bachelor of Science in Geology and a Master of Science (Hons) in Geology and Geochemistry from the University of Canterbury. He has a background in resource evaluation and management, strategic management and leadership, having worked for Mercury, a leading geothermal operator in New Zealand, Halliburton’s technology solutions team in Europe and now Seequent.