I am super-thrilled to be starting a two-year term as AAPG Europe Region president. The AAPG is a global force for good in our industry, and frankly, after 35 years exploring for oil and gas around the world, I needed to stop taking AAPG for granted.
There’s a lot to be done, but we have a great team and are looking forward to some cracking events and activities this year.
Before getting into that, I’d just like to take my hat-off to Fiona Macaulay our past Europe Region president, who has passed the baton on to me. Both a fabulous and inspirational leader, she has taken the region through a difficult time of right-sizing and re-organizing, leaving us in rude good health, whilst delivering a great set of workshops and conferences that really made a difference. Thanks so much Fiona, it is an awesome act to follow when I consider what you achieved with the day-job(s!) at the same time.
So – what state is the oil industry in, over in Europe?
To be frank, just now there’s not much in the UK that’s stable apart from the oil price, and it is this that is driving the international activity from here, where exploration and development geoscience is flourishing. Following some key exploration successes in the Mediterranean and Africa, a rejuvenated industry is leaning on new geoscience and engineering technologies to push forward great prospects and projects as the opportunity triggers tumble forward.
On the geoscience side, new appreciation of the importance of contourites in deepwater sedimentation, dynamic topography in the gluing together of the world’s geology and the extraction of insight on source rock presence and distribution directly from seismic is changing the way we look at the world, and the world’s exploration opportunities.
This year has some great AAPG initiatives ahead – over the summer we held an innovative “Risk and Uncertainty” workshop in Aberdeen (thank you Marc Bond and team), which was useful and a lot of fun (qualities you don’t always find together), and followed that with a very well attended field trip and workshop in Batumi on the Black Sea (thank you Gabor Tari and team) – a great effort showing the rising interest in the Black Sea region. Ahead next we had the Energy Transition Conference – another innovative style of conference speaking to the next generation of geoscientists to be represented and assisted by AAPG.
With a steady oil price, the next few years look strong and exciting for the oil and gas industry in Europe, giving AAPG a good platform to grow and bring new opportunities to a new generation of geoscientists.