Chris Cox
Full name: Chris Cox
Education: The Windsor Boys' School; BSc in Petroleum Engineering, Imperial College London (1979–1982)
Role: Chief Executive Officer, Serica Energy
Full name: Chris Cox
Education: The Windsor Boys' School; BSc in Petroleum Engineering, Imperial College London (1979–1982)
Role: Chief Executive Officer, Serica Energy
Cox has spent over 40 years in oil and gas, and the shape of that career tells you a lot about how the industry itself has evolved. He started at Chevron, where he stayed for 22 years — a stretch long enough to absorb the operational discipline that comes from a major. From there he moved to Hess Corporation before joining BG Group, where he spent nearly nine years and eventually sat on the Executive Committee with responsibility for all of the company's technical functions globally. That's the kind of role that requires understanding an operation from the reservoir up, not just from a spreadsheet.
After BG, Cox moved into the CEO seat proper, leading Spirit Energy for four years (having previously served as a Managing Director at parent company Centrica) before stepping down in February 2022. He then took on an interim CEO role at Capricorn Energy through 2023, and chaired Kellas Midstream along the way — a résumé that reads less like a straight career ladder and more like a list of companies that needed a steady hand during a tricky period.
In between, in 2023, he co-founded his own North Sea exploration and production venture, Curium Resources, with Graham Stewart — proof that even after decades running other people's companies, he still wanted to build something of his own.
Serica brought Cox in as CEO from July 2024, following a "rigorous recruitment process," in the words of then-chairman David Latin, who'd been holding the fort as interim CEO. It's easy to see the appeal on both sides: Serica wanted someone who'd already run substantial upstream businesses across multiple geographies, including the UK and Norway, with real ambitions to grow through acquisitions — and Cox, by his own account, was drawn to the challenge of a mid-sized, high-quality asset base after years running larger, more sprawling organisations.
Since taking over, Cox has grown Serica through a series of North Sea acquisitions, building on the company's existing Bruce and Triton hub interests. He was appointed to Serica's board in July 2024 and now sits on its HSE and Reserves Committees. In late 2025, Offshore Energies UK appointed him to its own board as well, cementing his role as an industry-wide voice, not just a company man.
Cox has talked about trusting his teams and delegating heavily — not as a management theory he picked up in a seminar, but as something that became a necessity when you're overseeing complex operations spread across different countries and regulatory regimes. That's arguably the real throughline of his career: an engineer's grounding paired with a pragmatic, hands-off leadership instinct earned the hard way.
No independently verified net-worth figure for Cox has been published, and detailed information about his family life remains private.
As the North Sea enters a period defined by field maturity and tougher investment decisions, Cox's specific expertise — extracting value from mature, mid-life assets rather than chasing greenfield exploration — puts him squarely at the centre of the basin's next chapter. Few executives in British energy have run this many companies through this many different phases of the cycle, and that experience is exactly what Serica is betting on.