David Rieder

Advisory Board Member
David (Dave) Rieder, PEng.
Mr. Rieder has a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Chemical Engineering and has over 30 years of engineering, consulting, and management experience in the petroleum and petrochemical industry. His career has regularly involved the successful introduction of new technologies to existing facilities by recognizing and negotiating the management of organization change that accompanies the technology. Experience has highlighted that quite often the human and organizational impacts of technology must be managed more than the technology itself.
In the refining sector he held positions of increasing responsibility in designs engineering, process engineering, process control engineering, operations, maintenance, and ultimately management. As a process control engineer, he introduced and implemented advanced process control technology on every major refining processing unit. Training operations to completely shift their conventional approach from simply running to continually optimizing was arguably the most important and rewarding lesson learned. This ultimately led to a senior consultancy with AspenTech Ltd. based in Cambridge, UK, where he led engineering teams to implement advanced, multi-variable process control solutions for petroleum refining and petrochemical clients throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Mr. Rieder has been the Engineering Manager of a refinery, responsible for all engineering, drafting, project management and capital construction activities, accountable for the annual capital budget of over $80 million and led a combined headcount of over 350 personnel.
As part of a major oil company’s corporate Complex Process Facilities organization, he managed a global business network for Safety Instrumented Systems across all global facilities. This position involved introducing a new technology class to automate complex process safety, and through his team he ultimately developed and institutionalized an entire asset management organization for safety instrumented systems across the global enterprise.
He is now managing an advanced process control engineering team, introducing and implementing new control and optimization technology at one of the world’s largest upstream crude oil production facilities located in the Caspian basin.