Who Is Emma Delaney? The First Woman To Run Austria's OMV In Its 70-Year History

Emma Delaney, a 30-year BP veteran who ran its global customers and products business, has become the first woman to lead Austrian energy group OMV since its founding in 1956.

Emma Delaney took office on September 1, 2026 as Chairwoman of the Executive Board and Chief Executive Officer of OMV. She is the first woman to run the company. Her term runs for three years, extendable by another two if all things work out. An Irish national, Delaney is the only woman currently leading a company in the ATX, Vienna's blue-chip index, and more broadly on the Vienna Stock Exchange Index.

She succeeds Alfred Stern, who had run OMV since September 2021 after leading its chemicals arm, Borealis. Stern’s mandate at OMV ended on August 31, with Delaney taking over.

Is OMV important to Europe’s energy security?

OMV is an integrated oil, gas and chemicals group with 2025 revenues of €24 billion and about 22,300 employees. It is Austria's largest listed industrial company and a dominant driver of national revenue and employment. It supplies a vast share of Austria's domestic fuel and heating needs and its operational network and supply chains stretch across Central and Eastern Europe, anchoring fuel and gas distribution from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The government owns 31.5% through its holding company, ÖBAG, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) owns 24.9%. ADNOC intends to transfer those to its investment arm XRG, after getting regulatory approval.

OMV signed its first gas contract with the Soviet Union in 1968. It ended its last one with Russia in December 2024, cancelling a Gazprom Export deal that was due to run until 2040.

The Austrian group now sits where two of Europe's hardest energy questions meet: how Central and Eastern Europe replaces Russian gas, and how far Gulf capital reshapes European industry.

Why the role of CEO of OMV matters?

Under Austria's two-tier system, the CEO chairs the executive board that runs the business and answers to a supervisory board on which both anchor shareholders, the state owned ÖBAG and Abu Dhabi owned ADNOC sit. Additionally, as one of nine companies owned by ÖBAG, that makes the CEO’s job as much political as corporate.

On the day Delaney was nominated, Chancellor Christian Stocker and Economy Minister Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer set out Vienna's expectations from the company under her helm: diversify supply relationships, have more of OMV's own production and greater independence of supply, ensure in-house raw extraction and accomplish expansion abroad.

From BP's Global Forecourts to the gilded halls of Vienna

Delaney arrives from BP, where she worked from 1995. She joined BP's executive team in 2020 and was most recently Executive Vice President, Customers and Products. Prior to this she was also interim chief executive of BP’s downstream business which includes fuels, convenience retail, biofuels, aviation fuel, lubricants and electric-vehicle charging, with more than 50,000 employees in her brief, in around 50 countries.

BP went through five CEOs since she joined the executive team until she left in April 2026. The move to OMV takes Delaney from running one division of a supermajor to running the whole of a smaller, state-anchored group.

Background: A multilingual Irish Economist with a global career in the Oil & Gas Business

Delaney did an undergraduate degree in economics and business at Trinity College Dublin, and a master's in management at ESCP Europe, graduating in 1995. That year she joined BP through its graduate scheme and is fluent in French and German

Her career moved between the upstream and downstream halves of the industry. Upstream, she was BP's regional president for western Africa, chief financial officer for Asia Pacific and head of business development for global upstream gas. Downstream, she held retail, commercial fuels and planning roles in Europe and further postings in France, Germany, Africa, Indonesia, Iraq, Beijing and London.

She has described in interviews, changing roles “every three years or so” and at one point, facing “a choice between more of a finance path and a general management path.”

Why This Appointment Matters?

In a March 2025 Heidrick and Struggles podcast, Delaney described the leadership challenge of the energy transition as: “how can we be adaptable but not flip-flop the whole time?” She carries that question from BP, which has since pivoted back towards oil and gas.

Then there are the implicit questions the headline “first female CEO in 70 years” raises. But the make-up of Austria's boardrooms and even broader European listed company boards should explain why that should not come as a surprise. Unlike their British and American colleagues, the number of women on management boards never took off in the first place. At the start of 2026, among the boards of companies listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange Index, the proportion of women stagnated at 13.8%. 31 of the 54 companies (57%) still have an all-male board.

Delaney’s role now allows the Vienna Stock Exchange a grand total of one female CEO compared to two female CEOs on the German DAX and four on France’s CAC40. Her appointment also lands in an industry where a top job rarely opens. In December 2025 BP named Meg O'Neill as CEO. Her grand headline was, ‘the first woman to lead one of the five largest oil majors’. She took over in April. Delaney left the same month, having been in the running for that job.

Then there is the ‘energy security’ angle. While not an oil major, OMV is definitively a critical regional major for Europe, having come into existence in 1956 to supply a recovering post-war Austria. It succeeded the Soviet-run mineral oil administration in Austria's Soviet occupation zone.

What she has inherited in 2026 is an organisation halfway through two bets made under its prior CEO.

A chemical joint venture combining Borealis with ADNOC's Borouge, into the Borouge Group International (BGI) where OMV has a 47% stake. That JV was meant to be listed in Abu Dabhi, but has has been delayed to 2027 due to the war in the middle east. That delay is expected to cut OMV’s income per share this year, with uncertainty on what will happen if the war drags on.

The other inherited bet is gas. OMV owns 51.2% of Romania's OMV Petrom which with Romgaz is developing Neptun Deep in the Black Sea. It is a €4 billion project due to produce first gas in 2027 and to make Romania the EU's largest gas producer. But will she continue the path Stern has set or find a growth story upstream or beyond chemicals is on the minds of analysts covering the oil and gas sector.

Delaney has two anchor shareholders with their own national agendas, flagship chemicals venture whose listing is on hold, and a Black Sea gas project that has yet to deliver first gas. Whether she can make the Gulf partnership pay while delivering on Central Europe's supply security will decide not just her and OMV’s future but also play a key role in Europe’s energy security.