Barry Winstead

Founding Partner, President & CEO

With over 40 years of industry experience, Barry has proven his ability to assemble high-performing teams and achieve exceptional returns across diverse assets, covering nearly all major producing onshore basins in the United States. As a founding partner of Forge Energy, developing this sort of experienced leadership team was Barry’s first priority. Barry is an established leader with a proven track record of sustained value growth, organizational alignment, focused asset management and operations excellence.

Starting his career as an engineer with The Superior Oil Company, Barry went on to spend over 20 years with Burlington Resources in multiple roles, ultimately serving as Vice President of BR’s Mid-Continent Division. After the acquisition of Burlington by ConocoPhillips, he spent two years heading up COP’s Business Unit responsible for Rocky Mountain, Permian and Mid-Continent operations. Forge Energy, which was started in 2011, completed a successful sale of their Delaware Basin assets to Oasis Petroleum for $946 million in February 2018.

Barry holds a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University (OSU) and was elected into the OSU Academy of Distinguished Engineers in 2005. He has served on advisory boards at OSU and Texas Tech University and has held leadership positions on many nonprofit boards.