Since 2005, Jean-Marc Leroy has been in charge of storage infrastructures and LNG terminals of Gaz de France, now GDF Suez. From 1997 to 2004, he has been active at Gaz de France head office in several key positions : Manager of the President’s Office, secretary of the Board, Deputy Vice president of the Strategy Division, Vice President in charge of Exterior Relations and Internal Communication. Jean-Marc Leroy started his career in Electricite de France (EDF). In 1994, he moved to Gaz de France as Deputy Vice President of Gaz de France Transmission Division.

Francisco de la Flor has been working in the natural gas business since mid eighties. He has worked in several companies, having responsibilities for commercial, technical, procurement, international and planning issues. He has been Director of Regulation at Enagas since 2002. At the same time, he is a Professor for University postgraduates at the Global Development Learning Network, belonging to the World Bank, and lecturer in many other training courses and fora. He holds university degrees in Chemical Engineering and in Economics Sciences and Business Management. He has completed a Business Administration Executive Program at the IESE Business School and followed doctorate studies in Economics.

Fabien Favret has been Vice President for Business Development Midstream – Gas Division for EDF since June 2008. Within this role, he is in charge of various UGS projects and UGS Business development. He is also Managing Director of EDF Gas Deutschland and a member of the shareholder committee of the Crystal JV (50% EDF, 50% EnBW). Fabien has a wealth of oil and gas experience, including R&D, industrial project management, operation, optimisation and reliability analysis of transmission networks and storage facilities and UGS. He also has experience as an international consultant.

The Zuidwending project is a cavern storage project, currently under construction. The project is a cooperation between N.V. NUON, a large energy distribution company, and N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie, a gas infrastructure company. Both companies are separately and independently marketing their capacity. The presentation will focus on the Gasunie role in this respect, an independent infrastructure company, creating Third Party Access to gas storage..

M.Gazi Gulger is currently working as Deputy Head of Department at Contracts and Engineering Department of BOTAŞ, fully in charge of Tuzgölü Underground Gas Storage Project and various pipelines tendering process. He had also worked as a Chief Contracts & Claims Engineer for Ceyhan Marine Terminal Onshore and Offshore Construction Works in Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Crude Oil Pipeline Project Directorate from July 2001 to September 2007. He had also worked as a Chief Contracts &Claims Engineer for special bridges & viaducs, as a Resident Engineer for special bridges & viaducs, as a Structural Engineer, as a Bridge Engineer and as a Resident Engineer in the same sector. He graduated from İstanbul Technical University in Civil Engineering, He received master degree in Bridge Engineering at University of Surrey, Guildford, ENGLAND and he studied Business Administration in the Department of Political Science (SBF) of Ankara University.

Escal is a company participated at present by its founder canadian oil & gas company CASTOR-EUROGAS, and by a very large building and construction Spanish conglomerate ACS. In the future it will be also participated by the Spanish gas common cerrier company ENAGAS. It s a single purpose company enterely devoted to build and operate the CASTOR off-shore gas storage, transforming an abandoned oil filed into a gas storage. As president of the company, Recaredo has the overall responsability of bringing the project to completion. In the early phases project definition and feed studies have been the focus. At present pushing the very complex licencing process is key, and soon the EPC contract will take over.

Rudolf is a professional negotiator and is involved in all LNG negotiation lines EconGas currently follows through. He helped secure first Regasification capacity for EconGas at the GATE terminal in 2007. Rudolf has recently been named Head of Business Development of EconGas and as such is responsible for strategic oversight of LNG. He remains deeply involved in the structuring and negotiation of all sorts of term agreements. Rudolf holds a Masters degree in Commercial and Taxation law from the Jean Monnet faculty in Paris.

Cynthia Poynter, IHS Midstream Database, is a recognized expert on oil & gas infrastructure globally. She joined IHS in 1998 to develop its global Midstream Database, providing key information on the location, capacity and ownership of oil & gas transportation, processing and primary market facilities. Before joining IHS, Ms. Poynter was Vice President International Business Development for Bonner & Moore Management Science and served as Director of European Petroleum Market Consulting in their Wiesbaden, Germany office. During her tenure at Bonner & Moore, Ms. Poynter was the architect of the Gasflow System which was implemented by U.S. gas pipeline companies to optimize their supply contract mix post deregulation. She also designed Bonner & Moore’s Global Energy Modelling System utilized by international oil companies to forecast crude oil and refined product trade movements and price arbitrages. Cynthia holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kentucky and started her professional career in DuPont’s Engineering Services Division.

Ben leads Wood Mackenzie's gas & power consulting practice in Europe, which advises clients on a range of market-related, project-specific and advisory engagements throughout the gas value chain.

Bob's expertise include strategies to exploit and develop natural gas markets, production sharing agreements with particular reference to gas, hydrocarbon resource appraisal/evaluation and gas transportation and storage. Previously, Bob worked at Conoco, where he worked on all phases of hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation.

Georg Schneider is an oil and gas consultant at ILF Consulting Engineers, Munich. He studied at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and received a M.Sc.(1986) in Process Engineering. In the last 5 years Georg was leading the engineering activities for different gas storage projects (salt caverns, depleted gas reservoirs) in various countries like Germany, UK, Austria and Albania.

Sandy Dunlop is Business Development Manager, International for Costain Oil, Gas & Process Ltd. Sandy has spent 30 years with the company as well as five years employed with AMEC and has experience of the provision of engineering solutions to a number of complex hydrocarbon processing projects throughout the world.