Phoenix Energy CEO Adam Ferrari Receives 2026 Young Alumni Achievement Award

In selecting Adam for this award, the awards committee cited him for founding and leading a rapidly growing domestic energy company and for advancing innovation through visionary entrepreneurship and engineering excellence. It's my honor to officially recognize Adam's accomplishments with the 2026 Young Alumni Achievement Award. Adam, please come forward to accept your award. I don't know how I can live that up. You sold me better than I could. And I thought it was Summa Cum Laude, but I'm going to go with Magna. Since I would not be here tonight without him, I want to start by thanking my mother and father. Despite my father's physical limitations, he was determined to make it here tonight. And thank you Marlene for taking the two hour drive south on I-57 and getting them here safely. Mom and dad without your support, who knows where I'd be today? Certainly not standing up here. I also want to thank the department professor Rob and Christy for this incredible honor and congratulations to my fellow awardees tonight. Looking around this room, I'm reminded that this university has an extraordinary habit of producing people who go out and do remarkable things. It's humbling to be counted among you. Certainly never thought I would be. One of the best things about being the founder and CEO of a private company is I get to live off script and speak my mind. So I'm going to try to keep it on the tracks tonight. Looking back at the milestones on my journey, a couple of moments really stand out. In elementary school, I was told I was good at math, but from that point through high school, I was convinced I was going to be a professional basketball player. And academics were not exactly a top priority. I was a kid growing up near Chicago in the 90s. Can you really blame me? For the young folks in the room, I'm talking about the Bulls. Once that dream ran its course, I pointed my math skills and my competitive drive towards a degree in chemical engineering. Why Chemie? A lot of people have asked me that. And the simple answer is, it was supposed to be one of the hardest majors and I never took the easy path in life. My last official day as a student on this campus was in May '25 and it's been about nineteen years since I've been back prior to last night. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was beyond ready for the next chapter, not that I didn't like it here, but it was exhausting. I had some great options coming out, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, upstream oil and gas. I chose upstream oil and gas because it was the one career that allowed me to commute to work via helicopter. And that pretty much summarizes me as a person. I spent the next several years as an engineer offshore in the Gulf Of Mexico on a rig about a 100 miles south of New Orleans. The first real test of whether the problem solving skills at this university would translate into the real world. Turns out this department had prepared me well. I spent about the next decade moving around through other oil and gas companies before I took the leap of faith and went out on my own. It was about 2014, mid-2014, I cashed out my $401Ks at the time, which wasn't much. I think my parents cashed out theirs. I was all in. I launched my first company in 2014. From 2014 to 2019, I was in full-on entrepreneur mode, launching startups, forming alliances and living through some real highs and some genuinely low lows. In those low points, I'd remind myself, I finished Magna Cum Laude in Chemical Engineering at this university. And if I could do that, there was no obstacle I couldn't overcome. I also met my amazing wife during one of those low points, and her support through the hard times is what prepared me for the good times that would inevitably come. In the highs, I found myself thinking about this place much differently of the professors, the TAs, the classmates, the staff who supported me. We tend to only celebrate the people who rise at the top of their field but the caretakers, the ones who pour themselves in helping others achieve their dreams are every bit as essential. That mindset forged on this campus is what pushed me into my next venture. And that was the origin of Phoenix Energy. I founded Phoenix Energy in 2019 with every penny, literally every penny I had in my name, and my parents did the same. All in it was somewhere around $2,000,000 including my parents' house. There were five of us working out of my tiny apartment in Denver. We had a lot of heart but very little capital compared to the giants in this industry that we were competing with daily. Seven and a half years later, I'm proud to say, Phoenix Energy is the fastest-growing American oil company over the last seven and a half years. We'll exit this year at roughly 65,000 barrels a day. For those of you who don't follow the industry, that's pretty big for a small private. Nothing like ExxonMobil, but we're doing our part. In 2026, Phoenix will clear over one and a half billion of top-line revenue and ranked sixth or seventh-largest oil producer in the prolific Bakken Shale of North Dakota. Phoenix is the first company ever in America to obtain an effective S1 registration from the SEC while still being privately controlled. Phoenix is the largest alternative capital formation vehicle ever established in the United States. Phoenix has set numerous drilling records for speed and depth in the Bakken. Phoenix now employs upwards of a thousand people across our multi-state operation. If you asked an AI model to estimate the odds of all that happening in the manner it did, no initial venture capital, limited family resources and five people in a small apartment, the model would tell you that the odds at best are one in a million. And it would also tell you it is tough to model because it's never happened before, prior to Phoenix Energy. I've been in oil and gas now for over two decades, hard to believe it went that fast. I've always known the capital formation side of the business was grossly inefficient. I set out to disrupt a broken system and I'm proud Phoenix Energy has done exactly that: removing layers of middlemen and paper pushers and directly connecting everyday Main Street investors to high value domestic oil assets that are managed by Phoenix. None of this would have been possible without my experience at this great university. If you ask me right now, what was the single thing at this university that best prepared me for my professional journey, it has to be the fact that to succeed in this department there is no shortcut. You simply have to outwork the competition and that is exactly how it is in the real world. When I was asked to accept this award and deliver remarks, I hesitated. Not because I didn't want to, but because I'm still in the field every day battling to build my vision at Phoenix Energy. But as I reflected on my years here, I realized I had to do this. I owe a great debt to this university. In closing, I want to speak to the current students, recent grads, and to the leaders of the story department. To the current students and recent grads, let my story be a source of motivation and hope. This could be you standing up here one day. You now have all the tools you need to do extraordinary things. The rest is simply up to you. To the leaders, this is the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those words are synonymous with excellence and achievement. The men and women forged in the fires of this institution have a destiny to pursue some of the most critical missions on this planet and the competitive spirit and pursuit of excellence that is ever present on this campus is exactly what prepares them for that higher calling. Never lose that. That's what makes this place so special and it's exactly where the story of Phoenix Energy began.