Our Founder

From a generation of knowledge and science, shaped by a science club at eleven, trained by recognised scientists before he left school, and tested for twenty-four years inside one of the largest oil companies in the world. THE OIL GRID is what that life added up to.

Identity

Name

Eng. Mubarak Taher

Full name, as on the patent

Mubarak Shater M. Taher

Nationality

Kuwaiti

Education

B.Eng. (Honours), Chemical and Process Engineering, Newcastle University, United Kingdom, 1995

Career

Kuwait Oil Company, 1996 to 2020 (24 years): process engineering, production and field operations

Role today

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Global Grid Alpha Corporation Limited, Dublin, Ireland

Invention

THE OIL GRID. Sole inventor and holder of US Patent 9,334,722 B1, granted 10 May 2016

Disciplines

Artificial intelligence, several fields of engineering and science, and management

Contact

Through info@ggc-alpha.com

A generation of knowledge

Some people find science late in life. Mubarak Taher did not have to find it. He comes from a generation of knowledge and science, and the interest showed early. He was building his own toys at four. By nine he had taken an interest in every field of science. He wanted to know how everything worked, and then how it could work better.

Eleven · The door opens

At eleven he joined the Kuwait Science Club. He calls it the boost point of his life, and it is easy to see why.

The club met a hungry mind and fed it. Electronics, chemistry, mechanics and robotics became his fields, and the club shaped his experience, his knowledge and many of the achievements that followed.

The awards followed one another through those years. Each was a small marker on the same road, and by the end of secondary school the road was clear.

The last years of school · Learning at KISR

Before he had finished school, he was training under recognised scientists at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. From its chemists and chemical engineers he learned the foundations of engineering. Alongside its scientists he learned something rarer for a student of his age: the fundamentals of building artificial intelligence.

Two threads of THE OIL GRID were already in his hands. One was process engineering. The other was the intelligence that he would one day design to run a whole field.

University · A first invention

He read Chemical and Process Engineering at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, taught by people at the top of their fields, and graduated with a B.Eng. (Honours) in 1995.

His final-year project, in his account, produced something he had not set out to make: an invention new to chemical engineering. It was a first invention, arrived at without intending it, and it opened the door to the next chapter.

1996 · Into one of the largest oil companies in the world

That door led to Kuwait Oil Company, one of the largest oil companies in the world. He joined in 1996 as a process engineer, and from the first day he watched.

What he saw was a pattern of shortfalls that repeated from plan to plan and field to field. He asked his management to let him train alongside the biggest names in the industry.

In 1997 he began the journey that would define his career: a single, complete answer to all of those shortfalls, not a patch for each. He finished it in 2006. It is told in full in Our Story.

Twenty-four years in the field

The grand solution was the long thread. Around it, he was never idle. With his colleagues he started and joined project after project, each one, in his account, solving a real problem and proving its efficiency. Among them:

• A smokeless flare system for conventional plants, one of his innovations at the company.
• The wireless smart field. Real-time field data over Wi-Fi and WiMAX: in his account, an idea adopted across the industry worldwide and a business worth more than 30 billion dollars today.
• Remote-sensing 3D mapping with advanced LiDAR systems of a field's surface and underground facilities.
• Variable speed motor (VSM) systems, developed in-house.
• Power from the heat of oil wells, including underground energy generation from depleted crude-oil wells, work that underlies the self-energising design of the SERM-GC.
• Field troubleshooting that rescued an existing project at the NK field and the newly built SEK field.
• An asset-enhancement programme, from 2013, a portfolio of value-creation projects that he started on his own initiative.

Across twenty-four years, these and many other in-house projects amounted, in his account, to more than 700 million dollars of work for the company. Every one of them began with a problem met in the field, and two of them lead straight to THE OIL GRID: the wireless smart field was an early step towards the Smart Field, and power from the heat of the wells underlies the SERM-GC's self-energising design.

Recognition

In his account, his work has been honoured on many occasions, by the Government of Kuwait, by other governments, and by the private sector.

• Kuwait International Bank, 2016: honoured under its social-responsibility programme for the "Dynamic Network for Oil & Gas Production".
• Al-Anba newspaper, Kuwait, 27 August 2016: reported on the dynamic grid system and its value to Kuwait.
• Kuwait Excellence Award, 2017.
• Sabah Al-Ahmad Center for Giftedness and Creativity: an honour for his work.
• Monte Carlo Doualiya (RMC), February 2022: interviewed on its "Café Show" as the inventor of a first-of-its-kind, environmentally responsible oil and gas production system.

He has received many honours from the Kuwaiti government and the private sector.

In his own words, as Al-Anba reported on 27 August 2016, he is the first Arab to register an international patent in the field of oil and gas production systems — unseen in the sector for about thirty years.

One patent, many ideas

He is the sole inventor and holder of US Patent 9,334,722 B1, "Dynamic Oil and Natural Gas Grid Production System", filed on 18 November 2015, granted on 10 May 2016 and in force until 2035.

In his own words, the patent brings many ideas together under one registration, so that the industry could be rebuilt from the ground up rather than repaired one part at a time. The design has been refined continuously since. Today's SERM-GC has no flare system and no tanks.

Founder of GGC-ALPHA

In 2023 he founded Global Grid Alpha Corporation Limited in Dublin to take THE OIL GRID to producing nations and operators around the world. He leads it as Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

An exclusive licence to his patent is to be granted to the Company under a licence agreement now being finalised with counsel. It is intended to be irrevocable and to survive his departure, incapacity or death, so that the Company's rights do not rest on one person.