Kate Ashcroft

Kate Ashcroft is a Director with the Costs and Technology team at S&P Global Commodity Insights, leading the Upstream Operating Costs Service.

Kate leads a team of analysts responsible for market commentary and forecasting across a range of upstream service markets with a focus on markets serving upstream operations.

Prior to this, Kate was a member of the Upstream Consulting group in the Costs and Technology team, responsible for cost estimating and performance improvement consulting activities worldwide. She specialized in developing activity-based cost models for the operations of major upstream projects to capture, forecast, and audit operating costs for a variety of upstream projects at all development stages, both onshore and offshore, and LNG liquefaction. She is also an expert in capital cost estimation tools and processes used in S&P Global having undertaken field development planning, concept selection, frontier environment, LNG life-cycle cost estimation studies, and LNG project benchmarking.

Kate undertook market forecasting consulting projects as part of the risk analysis process for clients looking to invest in new assets, from FPSOs and heavy lift vessels to power generation and gas compression.

She has led the development and support of the proprietary software tool OPE$T^™ used for operating cost forecast modeling by consultants and a number of national and international oil companies.

Kate joined S&P Global (now part of S&P Global) after graduating, with a master's degree in Chemical Engineering, from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom and is a member of the Institute of Chemical Engineers.