U.S. Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service Gulf of Mexico OCS Region NEWS RELEASE

MMS Names New Leasing Program Manager

Mr. Robert L. Sebastian has been appointed to the position of Leasing Program Manager, Leasing Activities Section, Office of Leasing and Environment, where he is in charge of policy, planning, adjudication, and sales.

Mr. Sebastian is a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, and attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1975 and Juris Doctor in 1979. During law school, he worked as a legal research assistant for the LSU Civil Law Institute and attended the University of San Diego Institute on International and Comparative Law in Paris, France, in 1978. Following graduation from law school, he worked from 1979 to 1980 as a Law Clerk for the Louisiana Court of Appeal, Second Circuit, in Shreveport. In 1980, Mr. Sebastian joined Chevron in New Orleans and held various positions there from 1980 to 1992, including Land Attorney and District Supervisor in the Offshore Land Division, working in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic OCS areas. From 1992 until 1995, he held the position of Manager of Contracts and Insurance for Tengizchevroil in London. In 1995, he returned to New Orleans, where he held a staff position in Chevron's Gulf of Mexico offshore exploration division. At the same time, Mr. Sebastian attended the Tulane University A. B. Freeman School of Business in New Orleans and earned an MBA in August of 1998. One week after graduation, he and his family moved to Moscow, Russia, where he held the position of Contracts Manager and then Business Manager for the $2.6 billion Caspian Pipeline Consortium project to build a crude oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan to a Black Sea port near Novorossiysk, Russia. He completed this assignment in June 2002, following which he assumed his current duties. Mr. Sebastian, his wife, Denise, and their two sons reside in New Orleans.

MMS is the federal agency in the U.S. Department of the Interior that manages the nation's oil, natural gas and other mineral resources on the outer continental shelf in federal offshore waters. The agency also collects, accounts for and disburses mineral revenues from federal and Indian leases. These revenues totaled nearly $10 billion in 2001 and more than $120 billion since the agency was created in 1982. Annually, nearly $1 billion from those revenues go into the Land and Water Conservation Fund for the acquisition and development of state and federal parks and recreation lands.

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