After graduating from Warwick University with a degree in maths in 1987, he moved to Brighton and qualified as an accountant at Arthur Young (soon to become Ernst & Young) in 1991. His first move into oil and gas was to Amerada Hess in 1996, where he was Head of Finance of North West Europe. Six years later, in 2002, he left to set up CH4 Energy with two Hess alumni, the successful business venture which managed the Markham field in the southern North Sea. The business was sold to Venture Production for £285mn in 2006.

That deal provided equity and the freedom to start up again, so in 2007 he founded Chrysaor (named after an ancient Greek figure). It had acquired financial backing that it used to acquire offshore licences including Spanish Point, on the west coast of Ireland, and Solan in the west of Shetland. The latter was originally explored by Amerada Hess in the 1990s, but was left untapped due to low oil prices. Chrysaor acquired it, did appraisal drilling in 2008–2009, and began extraction in 2013 at the rate of 28,000 b/d.

Former Chrysaor Finance Director Andrew Osborne, who joined the company in 2011, describes that field as the company’s main asset. But further expansion was being blocked, Osborne recalls, by banks’ reluctance to provide asset financing in the years immediately following the financial crisis, particularly for a single-asset development, which was seen as particularly risky.