Recently Retired NSTA Chair Awarded CBE

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Recently Retired NSTA Chair Awarded CBE

In a statement posted on its website this week, UK regulator the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) highlighted that Tim Eggar, the NSTA’s recently retired chair and former energy minister, “has been awarded a CBE in the New Year Honors List for services to energy”. Eggar was chair of the NSTA from 2019 until September […]

Eggar was chair of the NSTA from 2019 until September 2024, the NSTA pointed out in the statement, adding that he led the organization “through a period of evolving change including renaming the authority, embracing an expanding role in the energy transition, becoming the carbon storage licensing authority, and increasing the monitoring of emissions”.

“The authority carried out several oil and gas licensing rounds, as well as the UK’s first ever carbon storage licensing round, and became the offshore hydrogen storage and transport regulator,” the NSTA noted in the statement.

“During his tenure at the NSTA, there were five prime ministers, eight energy secretaries and seven energy ministers,” it continued.

In the NSTA statement, Eggar said “it was an honor and privilege to chair an outstanding board and public service team during a challenging and turbulent period”.

NSTA Chief Executive Stuart Payne said in the statement, “I am delighted to see Tim recognized in the New Year Honors”.

“Tim’s passion for the energy sector in the UK is clear to everyone who knows him,” he added.

“He has worked alongside the industry as a politician, worked in industry leading operators and supply chain businesses, and led the regulation of the industry as the Chair of the North Sea Transition Authority,” he continued.

“I and my colleagues are grateful for the leadership, challenge and enthusiasm that Tim brought during his tenure,” he went on to state.

Eggar became the Enfield North MP in 1979 and remained in parliament until he stood down in 1997, the NSTA statement highlighted, adding that he was first appointed as a minister by Margaret Thatcher in 1985. He served in three departments before being appointed Minister for Energy in 1992, the statement pointed out, noting that he served in that role for four years.

In a statement posted on its site on October 16, the NSTA announced Liz Ditchburn as its new chair.

“Liz is an experienced public policy leader who is currently on the board of the Net Zero Technology Centre in Aberdeen, where she is also the Audit Committee Chair,” the NSTA noted in that statement.

“She has worked at a senior level for both the Scottish and UK governments. Most recently, she was Director General for Economy for the Scottish Government, leading on all aspects of the economy and the drive towards net zero in Scotland. Previously, she was Policy Director at the Department for International Development (now part of FCDO),” it added.

MBE, CB Honors

In another statement posted on its website this week, the NSTA highlighted that Robert White has been awarded an MBE in the New Year Honors List.

“An experienced senior infrastructure manager who has dedicated his career to ensuring that the UK has enough energy to meet demand, literally keeping the lights on and homes warm, has been awarded an MBE in the New Year Honors List,” the NSTA said in the statement.

“Robert White, who worked in the same role for the UK’s energy departments until the North Sea Transition Authority (formerly the Oil and Gas Authority) was formed, has been given the honor for ‘services to energy security’,” it added.

“Robert, who has worked in the role since arriving at what was then the Department of Trade and Industry in 2006, has been an integral part of making sure the UK has had enough energy for nearly two decades,” it continued.

That NSTA statement noted that White’s work has seen him investigate ways to increase the UK’s gas storage, see the nation through four gas-balancing alerts in one winter, and manage supply issues in the face of an outage of the Forties Pipeline System in 2017. White is based in the NSTA’s London office and recently became part time, the statement highlighted.

In the NSTA statement, White said, “there are a lot of people who put in a long slog as a public servant and I’m just one of them, but of course I’m flattered”.

“I could have retired by now, but I really enjoy my job and recently I’ve started work on carbon storage and hydrogen and it’s fascinating to see how we can take the best bits from our work in oil and gas and apply them in a new way,” he added.

NSTA Chief Executive Stuart Payne said in that statement, “Robert represents the best of the NSTA, deeply experienced and knowledgeable with many years of service to the country including in times of crisis and in sensitive areas”.

“We couldn’t be prouder of his recognition,” he added.

In a statement sent to Rigzone this week by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the organization highlighted that its chief executive, Sarah Albon, has also been recognized in the New Year’s Honors list. Albon has been appointed a Companion of the Order of Bath for her services to the public sector, HSE noted.

In the statement, Albon said, “it is a great privilege to have been awarded a CB in the King’s New Year’s Honours list”.

“I’m proud to be a civil servant working on behalf of the public, and proud of the teams I lead. I have been very fortunate to work with dedicated and talented colleagues throughout my career and I see this award as testament to their achievements as much as my own,” Albon added.

Chair of the HSE Board Sarah Newton said in the statement, “it’s a pleasure to work with Sarah Albon who over the past five years at HSE has led the organization through significant challenges and change”.

“Since becoming Chief Executive of HSE in 2019, Sarah has provided outstanding leadership, implementing major initiatives of national significance, protecting people and places. I’m pleased to see this award rightly recognise Sarah’s contribution, both here at HSE and in her roles across the Civil Service, and I am delighted to congratulate her on this achievement,” Newton added.

Albon joined HSE in 2019 and led the organization’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the statement highlighted. Albon previously worked as Chief Executive of the Insolvency Service and for the Ministry of Justice and its predecessor departments, the statement pointed out.

The New Year Honors List for 2025 recognizes the achievements and service of extraordinary people across the UK, the UK government states on its website.

The NSTA regulates and influences the oil and gas, offshore hydrogen, and carbon storage industries, according to its website. HSE describes itself as Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety.

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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