Anelya Altiyeva
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From Kazakhstan’s oil fields to California’s energy map

I am the first person in my family to earn a university degree. I grew up in Kazakhstan, where oil and gas shape the national economy and the subsurface belongs to the state. I studied petroleum engineering at Satbayev University, worked in the laboratory at Heriot-Watt in Tomsk on reservoir rock properties, and interned at Halliburton and at Karachaganak, one of the largest oil and gas operations in the country.

Petroleum engineering taught me to read what is underground: the rock, the reservoir, the well, and the production history. Several years in Dubai real estate taught me to read a different layer of the same asset: ownership, leases, encumbrances, and the records that determine who carries a right or an obligation.

When I moved to San Francisco for an MBA, those two ways of reading an asset came together. California has inherited a vast oil-field record. A well that is no longer productive does not become an empty point on a map. It retains a closure cost, an operator, a transfer history, a financial guarantee, environmental risks, and sometimes a technically credible second use.

That is the work I am building toward in Silicon Valley: turning California’s oil legacy into accountable, well-level data for the people who operate, acquire, finance, insure, regulate, and repurpose energy assets. The objective is not to campaign against the industry. It is to make the full life of an asset legible — from production and transfer through plugging, restoration, or a qualified new-energy use.

What I am working on now

My current research asks who pays for plugging, abandonment, and site restoration when an oil or gas well becomes idle and the responsible operator cannot pay. California has strengthened its framework through escalating idle-well fees under AB 1866 and full-cost financial assurance for covered transfers under AB 1167. The remaining gap is measurement: company-level asset-retirement obligations still do not provide a verified account of liability at each well.

I am developing the financial and data logic beneath that gap: how closure costs should be estimated, how default risk should affect financial assurance, how liability should be tested in an acquisition, and how selected wells can be evaluated for geothermal energy, carbon storage, lithium or brine projects without allowing speculative reuse to delay necessary closure.

I am S&P Capital IQ Pro certified and on the way to pass CFA level I program. I joined AAPL on the Registered Landman track because I want to learn the profession I am building tools for, rather than around. My long-term interest is in acquiring and improving distressed oil and gas businesses: making their liabilities visible, their operations more disciplined, and their assets more capable of a productive next use.

Communities

At Golden Gate University I am  President of the AI Club . I am a member of AAPL  and of the Society of Petroleum Engineers the second since I was an undergraduate in Almaty, the first since this year, when I decided to learn the profession I am building tools for rather than around.

Outside this work

[[ANELYA WRITES THIS SECTION HERSELF — two or three sentences, in her own voice, about one real thing she cares about that has nothing to do with land, energy or finance, with one specific concrete detail. Test: if you delete her name, could many other names fit this paragraph? If yes, rewrite.]]

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