Mead Treadwell

Chair and CEO at Qilak LNG

Speaker

Former Alaska Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell is Chair and CEO of Qilak LNG, a Lloyds Energy Company, formed to bring stranded North American Arctic gas reserves to Asian markets directly by icebreaking tanker. Earlier in his career, he served as Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer of an earlier proposed LNG project, Yukon Pacific Corporation, acquired by CSX Corporation in 1989.

Treadwell is known as one of the world’s leading Arctic policy experts, and has helped build cooperation across the Arctic on economic, science, environmental and security issues since the early-1980’s. He has been a strong advocate for preservation of indigenous language and culture, and a strong advocate for economic and security cooperation in the North Pacific region.

Today, Treadwell is co-chair of the Washington DC based Woodrow Wilson Center’s Polar Institute Advisory Board and Chair of the Iceland based Arctic Circle’s Mission Council on Shipping and Ports. He is an advisor and participant in several Arctic Policy and information efforts, including the Arctic Encounter, the UK-based Polar Research and Policy Institute, Arctic Today, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Arctic, the Stanford University Hoover Institution’s Arctic Security Program, Alaska’s Commonwealth North and the Northeast Asia Economic Forum. The Government of Japan has awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Neck Ribbons in 2020, and he was bestowed Japan’s Foreign Minister’s Award for building US Japan relations in 2005.

In business, Treadwell is a serial entrepreneur. He was a founding officer of NASDAQ-listed Digimarc Corporation, and formerly TVX-listed Immersive Media, which pioneered StreetView for Google. He is chair of NASDAQ-listed Iridium’s Polar Advisory Board, a board member of Alaska air-cargo carrier Ryan Air, Arctic private equity firm Pt Capital, and Vice-Chair, Alaska of the Alaska to Alberta Railway.

As chair of the US Arctic Research Commission from 2006 to 2010 and a commissioner from 2001 to 2010, he funded the eight nation Arctic Council’s Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, which established an agreed-upon blueprint for marine safety in the Arctic. As chair of the Arctic Circle’s Mission Council on Shipping and Ports, he led development of pending bipartisan legislation in the US Congress to create a US Arctic Seaway Development Corporation. During the toughest time in US-Russian relations in a generation, Treadwell successfully pushed for a vessel traffic agreement in the Bering Straits, accepted by the International Maritime Organization.

Connecticut born Treadwell is a 1982 graduate of the Harvard Business School, a 1978 graduate of Yale. He and his wife, Virginia Clay McClure, formerly of Lexington, Kentucky, met at Florida’s Sanibel Island. By his late wife Carol Walsh Treadwell, he has four children: Timothy, Jack (deceased 1993), William and Natalie.

July, 2020