Alumni spotlights

The first time John Baillie (BSc ‘81) attempted to retire was 2006. 

He’d spent 25 years with Chevron working long weeks in the U.S., Canada and West Africa. “I had a great career with Chevron, and I really enjoyed it all, but I just wanted to take a break,” he says. “I spent two years skiing, surfing, biking and hiking. And then I said, ‘Okay, I miss having a little team.’ I knew some people in Switzerland who were running an upstream oil company, and they said: ‘John, you like to ski, come on over.’”

In 2008, Baillie started working with Addax Petroleum, a Geneva-based oil and gas exploration and production company that works in Africa, the Middle-East and Europe. The company was acquired by Chinese-owned Sinopec in 2009. He “retired” from that job in 2016, reducing his hours to part-time.