After 17 months as the captain at the wheel of Houston-based Chord Energy Corporation—the top dog in the Williston Basin operating 1.3 million net acres with production reaching 287,000 BOED—Danny Brown landed a new outside opportunity and a sweet offer he simply couldn’t refuse. Michael Lou, on the other hand, will now fill that void at the top, becoming Chord’s new CEO after 17 years with the company.  

Reese Energy Consulting today is following the latest on two major oil and gas leadership appointments that have coincidentally (or not) overlapped each other on the news front with one company taking eight months to find a replacement CEO and the other only a matter of days to put a new CEO in the driver’s seat.

You might recall last February Nick Dell’Osso bid adieu to his role as CEO from then-Okla. City-based Expand Energy now headquartered in Houston. The company’s Non-Executive Chairman of the Board stepped in as interim CEO until the position was filled. The search to find the right candidate didn’t come fast—eight months to be exact—but Expand has finally found its captain in Daniel “Danny” Brown, now the former CEO of Chord. And make no mistake, the nation’s leading integrated natural gas producer, Expand, will pay him handsomely to meet the growing demand of LNG exports, electrical power, and new industrial investments.    

Brown resigned his post with Chord October 16^th.

Three days later, Chord announced Michael Lou, a longtime company executive with more than 25 years of oil and gas experience, will now take the reins as president and CEO with a seat on the board. We think these guys need to go have a beer.