ABOUT US

Dipl.-Ing. Robert Philipp

Founder & Partner  CTO surface engineering

After his studies in Environmental Engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna (“BOKU”) Robert was hired in 1996 by OMV, the Austrian national oil company. He was in charge of oil related environmental clean-ups and similar tasks. He was also a part of the team taking care of the decommissioning of exploited oil or gas wells. For years he asked himself why these multi-million-dollar objects are just destroyed instead of reusing them for geothermal energy.

After almost a decade of working at OMV he and a partner founded a spin-off from this company and took over the environmental business from OMV in 2004. This company is alive and kicking – but Robert still has this thorn of the unused geothermal potential of exploited oil and gas wells.

Beside his work in the environmental business since more than two decades Robert is a board member in the Vienna Basin Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) as well as a member in four other professional associations in the arena of ground water, hydrocarbons and geothermal energy.
A part of his daily work also covers research activities in private and public funded projects in his technical sector, which is why he is frequently invited as a speaker on national and international conferences on ground water and remediation.

Robert was rewarded a few times for his work as an entrepreneur. Amongst other entrepreneurial prices he is proud to be a member of the “Entrepreneur of the Year” family of Ernst & Young and to have been handed the “Service Company of the year” award in 2008 personally by the Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer.

Dipl.-Ing. Werner Donke

Founder & Partner CTO subsurface engineering, E&P relations

After his studies in Petroleum Engineering at the Mining University in Leoben (“MUL”) Werner started his career in 1997 at Halliburton, one of the worldwide leading oil field service companies, in Germany. His first assignment was to establish two new production-related services in Central Europe. Since the early 2000s he held several positions in business development and operations management across Central Europe. As Managing Director of Halliburton’s entities in Germany, Romania, Hungary and Austria he oversaw Halliburton’s business in most of Central and Eastern Europe.

During all his years in the oil and gas industry, Werner was puzzled that the life of a well was ended when it could not produce enough oil or gas economically. During his assignment as Operations Manager in Germany from 2008 to 2011 he represented Halliburton in industry associations to further the use of geothermal energy.

Werner is an active member of the international Society of Petroleum Engineers (“SPE”) and the Austrian Society for Petroleum Sciences (“ÖGEW”), from which re received the Advancement Award for his master thesis „Economic Evaluation of Drilling Projects in Mature Areas Using Risk Analysis and Forecasting Based on Historical Data“.

After he left Halliburton in 2016, Werner joined forces with Robert to find an economic way to “recycle” existing depleted oil or gas wells to give them a “second life” producing geothermal energy. After spending half of their lives in (or near) the oil and gas industry, they embarked on the mission to convert sources of hydrocarbons into sources of “green”, renewable, and sustainable geothermal energy.

Dipl.-Ing. Sabine Appelt

Project manager & Consultant

Sabine has green fingers and therefore studied agriculture at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, specialising in agricultural economics. Thanks to her many internships both during her studies and afterwards in her professional life, she has access to a large network of regional and organic farmers and production companies.

It is very important to her to put both theory and practice into practice. Over the past ten years at REWE, she was responsible for the ten largest (former) Merkur shops in the fruit and vegetable department (quality, availability of goods, Group targets) and also trained around 200 employees on site. As she was always busy with customers at the POS, she was able to quickly pass on and thus realise the needs and requirements of customers – as an interface to the purchasing department at head office.

This was the beginning of pursuing her passion and enthusiasm for innovation in sales and product development. She then worked as an innovation manager at Wiener Gärtner, where the winter vegetable project – producing vegetables in winter without heating the greenhouses with fossil fuels – was implemented on a larger scale with scientific support and added to REWE’s product range.

The import and distribution of roses from Ecuador prompted Sabine to swap this activity for meaningful and sustainable work. It was in this context that Sabine and the three „Greenwells“ got to know each other and it quickly became clear that Sabine, as project manager for concept and plan development in Kemating, could use her agricultural expertise, her network and her experience in project management to implement a viable pilot project.

Dipl.-Ing. Michael Altrichter

Partner and Business Angel

Michael Altrichter, is a Business Angel, Impact Investor and TV Host in Austria. After co-founding paysafecard and payolution and successfully selling to the UK company Skrill Michael Altrichter today is one of the most active Business Angels and Impact Investors in Austria. His present portfolio includes investments in 37 Startups as FinTech, Blockchain, AI and App-service companies – for example the Trading&Investment platform wikifolio (www.wikifolio.com/) and the Tourtravelling platform Tourradar (www.tourradar.com) as well as recycling of dried up oil wells for geothermal energy usage (www.greenwell.energy). Simultaneously to investing in Discovering Hands, an organisation training blind women to perform breast cancer medical screening, he was awarded in 2014 Business Angel of the Year. Also he acts as Chairman Supervisory Board of the stock-listed startup300 AG, Austria´s leading Startup ecosystem linking Startups and innovation-minded Corporates. Additionally he preforms as member of the investor panel in the PULS4 TV Startup Show „2 minutes 2 millions“ and co-produces his own TV show „Austria – the land of innovation“.