Ronnie Irani
Editor's note: This profile is part of Hart Energy's 50th anniversary Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers of the past 50 years and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
The 10 best years of Ronnie Irani’s life began with a notion that had been bouncing around his head for a while.
“It started as an idea at the kitchen table that I was playing with, and thinking back on what I knew about the industry and how to tie that with the modern technology of horizontal drilling and fracking that was just forming back in 2005,” he told Hart Energy.
The result was RKI Exploration & Production, which Irani built into an Oklahoma City-based E&P operating in the Permian and Powder River basins before selling to WPX in 2015 for $2.75 billion.
“If there is a company you can build from scratch, this one would fit the bill,” Irani told Hart Energy in 2016. “It was a pure build, from absolute zero.”
But building multibillion-dollar energy companies has been Irani’s trademark in a career spanning more than four decades.
After starting his career with Woods Petroleum, Irani joined Louis Dreyfus Energy Services to help build up a company focused on natural gas. He was able to turn a $40 million investment into a $2.6 billion company.
When Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas was sold to Dominion Energy in 2001, Irani stayed at Dominion as a senior vice president and general manager until 2005, when he started RKI Exploration & Production.
But Irani, who immigrated to the U.S. from India, never would have reached the heights of the energy industry without his older brother Barry.
“Because of him, I got into oil and gas, the whole industry,” he said. “When I came to the U.S., he was already working in the industry. So, weekends he would be working at the office and I would just join him and I would see the maps and I would see the logs. And so, that really hooked me even before I got my summer internship.”
His interest in his older brother’s work propelled Irani through his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Oklahoma and enabled him to get his start in the oil and gas industry at Woods.
Now, he is the founder and CEO of RKI Energy Resources, an Oklahoma-based privately held energy company. He works behind the scenes in the industry, sharing ideas and helping companies find oil and gas. He is also a major supporter of the Ronnie K. Irani Center for Energy Solutions at the University of Oklahoma and involved in numerous charities and nonprofits.
“One line that I’ve always lived by is, ‘Commit, then providence moves also,’” Irani told Hart Energy.
He is now in a position to pass along his experience and lessons learned to a new generation of young people entering the oil and gas workforce, Brook Simmons, president of the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma, told Hart Energy.
“I am convinced the benefit to society will ripple far beyond the energy industry for many decades to come,” Simmons said. “The world needs more Ronnie K. Iranis. And you know what? He is helping make them.”
—Jaxon Caines, Technology Reporter