Muharrem Turkarslan, co-founder of the TBS Petrol, has 35 years of extensive experience in the upstream oil and gas sector where he has undertaken several technical and managerial roles. He started his professional geophysics career in 1974 with Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) as a field seismologist and worked in various seismic crew operations across Turkey. Later, he was assigned to TPAO Headquarters as Interpretation Geophysicist, where he interpreted seismic data of various exploration blocks in Southeast Anatolia and Thrace basins and prepared well proposals. In the following years, his engineering and management portfolio further expanded through the various roles he assumed in the exploration Group, including Project Geophysicist, Project Supervisor, Exploration Coordinator and Offshore Exploration Manager for domestic exploration projects.

Serving head of the International Projects (IP) department, Muharrem Turkarslan managed all upstream business development activities of TPAO between 1993 and 1996. During his tenure as the head of the IP department, he had been one of the key contributors to TPAO's successful E&P activities in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Algeria. From 1995 to 2005, he held various management roles of high responsibility, including Member of the Board of Directors of TPAO and its joint ventures KazakhTurkMunay in Kazakhstan and Turkish Petroleum International Corporation (TPIC) in Turkey, Vice President of TPAO and, Senior Advisor to the CEO and President of TPAO. Retiring from TPAO in 2005, Muharrem Turkarslan joined Çalık Energy as E&P Group Coordinator where he successfully completed numerous oil and gas projects in Turkmenistan, Turkey, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. From May 2007 to October 2008, he served as Vice President of Seana Energy, responsible for developing E&P projects in the Caspian and Middle East Regions. Since December 2008, he has been giving advisory support on oil and gas E&P projects to domestic and international energy companies.

Muharrem Turkarslan earned his B.Sc. degree from the University of Istanbul, in 1974 and M.Sc. degree from the University of Oklohoma, in 1979, both in Geophysics. He also worked as Research Associate in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences in Rice University, in 1989 and completed a research project on sequence stratigraphy and structural interpretation of seismic data and well logs from the Thrace Basin of Turkey.