Kevin Fontenot, EMBA ‘14

In March 2005, Kevin Fontenot witnessed one of the worst petrochemical incidents in history, the ISOM explosion at the BP Texas City Refinery that took 15 lives. Drawing upon his nearly 25 years of experience in the oil and gas industry at that time, Fontenot assisted in the incident investigation following the explosion. This experience gave him the desire to pursue a career in safety.

In 2006, Fontenot was promoted to Texas City Site Safety Superintendent at BP. In this role, he led a team of 30 proprietary safety professionals and approximately 100 contract safety professionals. The BP Texas City Refinery is a 470,000 barrel per day facility with 26 processing units and approximately 6,000 employees who accrue more than 17.5 million man-hours annually.

In April 2010, Fontenot was selected to participate on the official BP Horizon internal investigation as a master root cause analyst. This experience strengthened his desire to move into a senior leadership position within BP’s safety organization. Although he possessed vast field experience, he realized that this move would not be possible without the addition of a strong knowledge of business management.

To strengthen his academic resume, Fontenot returned to college and completed his undergraduate studies with a bachelor’s degree in business. Immediately following graduation, he began looking for an MBA program that would provide the additional business skills needed to lead a corporate safety organization. After completing a thorough evaluation of all the MBA programs in the Houston area, he selected the Texas A&M Executive MBA (EMBA) program.

Fontenot’s decision was driven by the program’s high return on investment, competitive cost of entry, professors who are leaders in their field and the strong Aggie network and culture. Additionally, the program provided an opportunity for him to give back to the oil and gas industry through his capstone project. Fontenot’s capstone project evaluated the feasibility of establishing a centralized database to capture craft skill credentials for craftsmen working within onshore petrochemical facilities along the Gulf Coast. The project determined that the database has the potential to reduce the risk profile of these onshore petrochemical facilities through the reduction of process safety incidents.

Following graduation from Mays Business School’s EMBA program, Fontenot was promoted to Director, Upstream Safety Performance; a senior-level leadership position within BP’s Upstream Safety andOperational Risk Organization. In 2013, BP’s upstream segment had activities in 27 countries, and the workforce accumulated 158 million man-hours. In this global role, Fontenot manages a team of employees in the United Kingdom and the United States, and he is accountable for the assimilation and assurance of upstream segment safety performance data reported to senior executives and external agencies. “The knowledge I gained in the EMBA program has been critical to my success in this senior-level position,” he said.