Wade Spear

With 18 years of oilfield experience spanning operator and service company roles, Wade Spear brings extensive expertise in drilling, geosteering, and production operations. His career began at Baker Hughes as a Measurement While Drilling Engineer, where he founded and led the Reservoir Navigation Services (RNS) Geosteering group in Oklahoma City. Under his leadership, the team grew to nine engineers and increased RNS revenue by 800% in 2009, generating $15MM in pull-through revenue while capturing significant directional services market share.

At LINN Energy, Wade progressed from Reservoir Navigator to Production Engineer and Drilling Operations Lead. He successfully geosteered wells across 18 target zones with 98% placement accuracy and reversed production decline from 28% to 6% growth through strategic optimization. Leading drilling operations across the Midcontinent Region, he drilled 30+ horizontal wells targeting multiple formations and achieved industry-leading capital costs of $282 per lateral foot with zero sidetracks or equipment losses across 700,000 feet drilled.

Since 2018 as Drilling Engineer at Citizen Energy, Wade has drilled and geosteered 98 wells in the Western Anadarko Basin, including 22 wells exceeding 14,000' TVD. Through rigorous focus on full-cycle economics, he has delivered best-in-field drilling costs while managing $284MM in capital expenditures with less than 1% variance between estimates and actuals.

Wade co-hosts the Local Energy podcast with Peter Brecht.