Pilko and Associates



"Helping forge the
Pilko Governance Practice"

Charles M. Rampacek

Position: Executive Associate
Office: Dallas, TX
Email: charlie@pilko.com
Phone: 214-673-7499
Fax: 713-357-0990

Biography

Asked what accomplishment he’s most proud of, Charlie Rampacek harks back to his tenure as CEO of the Lyondell-CITGO joint venture refining company, when he led the company through a $1.1 billion refinery expansion and modernization project. “It was a challenge,” he says. “The refinery had previously had a lot of operational, environmental and safety issues, and they were in the process of expanding and modifying to run heavy crude from Venezuela.” Under Charlie’s leadership, Lyondell-CITGO completed the construction on budget and ahead of schedule and quickly exceeded design targets. During his tenure, the refinery reduced recordable injury rates from 2.5 to less than 1, reduced environment exceedances by 40%, and increased operating efficiency by 10%. “We proved that good environmental and safety performance go hand-in-hand with good operational and financial performance,” he says.

Charlie Rampacek’s career has revolved around tackling difficult issues like this – and fixing them. Although he started work life as an Exxon process engineer, within a few years he was an operations manager solving problems at Exxon’s  new  refinery in Benicia, CA. “I was one of the first imports brought in to help improve the operations of this refinery,” Charlie says, “and that’s where I got my first operations experience, a lot of it. I was intimately involved in environmental, health, and safety issues.”

Within a few years the refinery had significantly improved, and Exxon brought Charlie back to Houston as planning manager for their new synthetic fuels department. “I helped them begin to build a big shale oil plant in Colorado,” Charlie says. “Exxon had concluded that the world was running out of crude oil and crude prices were rising quickly – but they were about 25 years ahead of their time. When oil prices fell in 1981, the synthetic fuels projects became uneconomical, and we shut down the shale oil project and other projects.”
Charlie was transferred back to refining and after a stint as planning manager for Exxon’s Refining and Supply organization; he was lured away from Exxon to become Senior VP of Refining, Supply and Natural Gas Liquids at Tenneco. Once again, he was intimately involved in EHS activities related to Tenneco’s refining and NGL business. And once again, he was busy fixing problems. “We built a large expansion and modernization project at the Tenneco Chalmette refinery just outside New Orleans,” he says. “We were one of the first companies to secure long term crude contracts with the Venezuelans, so I spent some time in Venezuela negotiating crude contracts, and I spent a lot of time with engineering and construction companies to make sure our expansion was designed and built correctly. The refinery previously had a history of poor EHS performance, and we made significant improvements there, as well as in the operational and financial performance.”

When Tenneco was forced to divest its refining business, Charlie was asked to lead the sales effort. His success at selling the refining business left him without a job, but not for long. “The Vice-Chairman of Tenneco asked me to head up operations for the regulated gas pipeline business because he anticipated that the future pipeline industry would be de-regulated, and he wanted a non-regulated mind-set. I got involved with lots of environmental issues – particularly PCBs and the associated clean-up. We were right at the leading edge of discovering and helping to fix those issues,” he says.

And this led him to his fix-it role at Lyondell-CITGO.

After Charlie “retired” in 2003, he spent a year fixing up projects his wife had waiting for him. “Then she said, ‘Why don’t you get out of the house?’ I’d taken over!” So Charlie returned to the energy industry as a senior management consultant and director of two energy related companies. Today he brings his executive prowess at problem solving to Pilko, where he is a key member of our Corporate Governance team.

“We are developing tools that upper management and boards of directors can utilize in evaluating and improving their EHS performance,” he says. “Our goal is for Pilko to be the leading advisors, evaluators and auditors of EHS work processes, practices and procedures.”

When not helping Pilko clients, Charlie can be found working on his ranch north of Fredericksburg, TX, or in other outdoor pursuits: managing the ranch’s wildlife, hunting, golfing, snow skiing and jogging to stay in shape for everything else. He and his wife, Lois, have two daughters; both married, and are the grandparents of a boy and a girl.

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