About

Stephen O’Sullivan began his oil & gas career as an oil trader, economist and Asian corporate planner in the downstream and trading divisions of BP. He then spent several years with the upstream and gas divisions of Total, working with natural gas, NGLs, shipping, pipeline management and the Sullom Voe oil terminal. In 1989 he joined Coopers & Lybrand as a Senior Strategy Consultant in the oil & gas consulting team, working on the privatisation and restructuring of the energy sectors across emerging markets as well as on both sides of the nuclear sector.  He lived and worked in China, Russia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa and the Middle East in this period.

In 1995, he was appointed Head of Research and Oil & Gas Analyst at MC Securities in London – an Emerging Europe-focused investment bank, where the team was consistently number 1 ranked in EMEA oil & gas research.  Following the sale of MC Securities to JP Morgan in 1998, he moved to Moscow as a Partner and Head of Research at United Financial Group, Russia’s leading independent investment bank, where he and his team were ranked the number 1 oil & gas research team and the number 1 Russia country team for nine years in a row.

After the sale of UFG to Deutsche Bank in 2005, Stephen became Head of EMEA and Latin American Research for Deutsche Bank where his research team was ranked the number 1 team across all the industry sectors, in strategy and economics, in country research for Russia & South Africa and across the broader EMEA region in 2006 and 2007. In 2007 he moved to Hong Kong as Head of Asian Research for Australia’s Macquarie Bank. In 2009 he joined Barclays Capital in Hong Kong to lead the build-out of the bank’s Asia ex-Japan equity research business.

In 2013 he joined Trusted Sources as a shareholder focusing on China energy and based in Hong Kong. His major research themes include China’s gas sector reform, China’s nuclear renaissance and the country’s global impact on energy markets. 

He is also a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, the world’s number 1 ranked energy think tank. At Oxford he has published several major studies of the Chinese energy sector.

He is a contributing author to several international think tanks on global energy issues and advises international law firms on the oil & gas sector globally.