Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes is an engineer with nine years’ experience in acquiring, financing, and developing both greenfield and brownfield natural resources projects around the globe. Zumwalt-Forbes currently serves as a Director, Co-Founder, and President of Black Mountain Metals, a private battery metals mining company, Black Mountain Exploration, a private natural gas company, and Black Mountain CarbonLock, a private carbon negative company. Zumwalt-Forbes also serves on the Strategic Advisory Board for Hennessy Capital’s fifth SPAC (NASDAQ: HCICU), the Female Venture Fund, TCU’s Energy Institute, Polestar (Volvo’s EV brand), and OU’s School of Petroleum Engineering.

Prior to joining Black Mountain in 2017, Zumwalt-Forbes worked in several Lead Engineering roles at ExxonMobil and XTO Energy, managing drilling, completions, and planning aspects of international shale exploration, laying the groundwork for >US$1 billion capital deployment.

Zumwalt-Forbes graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oklahoma with a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Ms. Zumwalt-Forbes was recently highlighted as the featured honoree on the 2020 Forbes 30 under 30 in Energy list.

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