Sara N. Ortwein

Sara Ortwein became a drilling engineer for Exxon after earning a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 1980. Over the span of her career, she has held numerous technical, operations and planning assignments within the upstream oil and gas sector.

She held a variety of positions within Exxon’s U.S. production operations, working in New Orleans, Midland and Houston. Later, she was the reservoir evaluation and planning manager for Exxon Ventures, CIS, where she worked on new venture capture in Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Following the ExxonMobil merger in 1999, Sara was responsible for production reservoir engineering worldwide as reservoir engineering manager. From 2001 to 2003, she served as advisor to the upstream director at the company’s corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas. She was named production manager with U.S. Production in 2004, running all ExxonMobil-operated production operations in the United States.

Sara is currently the vice president of engineering for the ExxonMobil Development Company. In this position she is engaged in the integral role of ensuring the technical quality of the engineering work that supports all of the company’s projects around the world. She is responsible for recruiting, developing and deploying engineers across ExxonMobil Development Company.

Sara participates on the advisory council for the ExxonMobil Corporate Initiative on Women's Economic Opportunity, which focuses on building women business leaders and entrepreneurs, reducing barriers to women’s economic participation, and helping identify and deploy enabling technologies globally.

In 2008, Sara was inducted into the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering’s Academy of Distinguished Alumni.  As well, she has been a Friend of Alec supporter since 1986 and is a member of The University of Texas System Chancellor’s Council.