Joe Weir

I'm an engineer and operational leader with more than 20 years in oil and gas across Australia and Canada. My work has taken me from Alberta's conventional and heavy oil fields to Queensland's coal seam gas.

I led production engineering at Senex Energy, led workover engineering and transformation work at Origin Energy, and started my career in drilling, completions and production engineering at Devon Energy.

Career highlights

• Led production engineering through a growth phase in which gas sales rose to more than 70 TJ/d.
• Doubled pump run life twice: from 2.5 to 5 years, then from 5 to 10.
• Led a team of up to 12 engineers as workover activity grew from about 50 to more than 1,700 operations a year.
• Part of a transformation team that delivered $8M a year in recurring cost reductions.
• Cut pump repair costs from about $300,000 to $120,000 per well.
• Managed multi-million-dollar capital and operating budgets, and presented plans, forecasts and risks to executives and board-level stakeholders.

Why Otigen

In 2025 I founded Otigen as my independent practice. Across my career I've seen that good engineering and good processes do more than cut costs: they give people back the time to think.

The name reflects that. Otia is Latin for leisure: the time reclaimed after the daily grind, used to think and create. Add -gen, to create, and you have Otigen: the generation of that time.

How I work

• Process first, automation second. I apply Lean thinking to understand and simplify the work before adding technology.
• Value, not hype. I build practical tools, including AI, and use them where they genuinely save time or reduce risk.
• Safety and integrity. Two decades of well integrity, abandonment and operational risk work shape how I approach every problem.

Credentials

• MBA, The University of Queensland (2026)
• Graduate, Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD)
• Chartered Professional Engineer (CPEng), Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ), Member of Engineers Australia
• BSc Chemical Engineering, University of Alberta

Governance

My grounding in governance comes from operations: as Technical Authority for well integrity, I set performance standards, led root cause analysis of failures and ran management of change. I completed the AICD Company Directors Course in 2026 and chair the body corporate committee of a 57-lot residential scheme. I'm interested in board and advisory roles across energy, resources, utilities and infrastructure.