Alumni spotlight
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John Baillie BSc'81 (Chemical Engineering)
From a homeroom at Schulich to a global community
John Baillie keeps trying to retire from a thriving international career
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.
Even though you're pursuing an education on your own, you're all in it together, doing labs and such. That just translates to a lot of life. That's the way you work through everything. You need to work with a team.
John Baillie BSc'81 (Chemical Engineering)
He and his wife, fellow Addax employee and UCalgary alumni, Fayda Khalek Baillie (BSc‘94) travel a lot, “chasing the snow or good weather” and spending time in homes in Calgary, Lake Tahoe, Hawaii and of course, Switzerland.
“In Switzerland, we live way up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, but I can still be in London or Milan for lunch,” he says. “I meet fascinating people in Switzerland all the time. I think that's why I get involved in so many things. You meet some people, and they know some people and all of a sudden, you're wrapped into something.”
For example, Baillie is working with a Swiss company exploring closed-loop geothermal testing in Alberta. “Canada's a good place to try the technology out because we have a lot of the drilling technology, expertise and services, and you can do things here for a reasonable price. You can't do any drilling for a reasonable price in Switzerland, Germany or France.”
Baillie aims to keep work to less than four months a year, including the time he teaches international petroleum management at Sinopec’s corporate university, something his late father, a geologist, also enjoyed. “There are lots of westerners who get involved with China, but not a lot of fathers and sons,” he says. “I think I have as much fun as he did. I always enjoy taking a class picture, like he would.”
As Baillie senior was teaching in China and elsewhere, his son was finishing his petroleum and chemical engineering degree at Schulich and learning about teamwork in his assigned homeroom. “We were set up in homerooms that got you into that team concept—everybody working on things together,” he says. “Even though you're pursuing an education on your own, you're all in it together, doing labs and such. That just translates to a lot of life. That's the way you work through everything. You need to work with a team.”
While Baillie tries to limit how much time he spends working these days, he always makes time for his outdoor pursuits—paddle boarding down the Elbow River in the summer, skiing the Alps in the winter, mountain biking in Tahoe and hiking in Hawaii whenever he feels like it.
“People my age call it the ‘go-go’ years,” he says. “You can still travel and be active, with lots to do and explore. At some point in time, there come the ‘slow-go’ years. And then the joke is there's the ‘no-go’ years.”
