Looking back on a career that took him from northern Appalachia to Sudan, Kenya and then to Egypt, William “Bill” Bosworth, the 2026 AAPG Sidney Powers Memorial Award Winner, credits his successes to the right combination of luck, timing, friendship and professional guidance.
And, oh yeah – his “addiction” to finding oil and gas.
The journey seemed pretty normal at first.
“In graduate school and as a college professor, for research, I focused on the thrust belts of the northern Appalachians, and related structural problems,” he said.
But then Bosworth joined Marathon Oil in 1984.
Goodbye Appalachia; hello Africa.
As it happened, the company was looking for someone with geologic field experience and a structural background – he was lucky to get the job, he told the EXPLORER, because he had actual field/outcrop experience – to work in new exploration acreage in the Sudan and Kenya, and then, as it happened, in Egypt, specifically the Gulf of Suez and Red Sea.
“The exploration in all these areas was in extensional rift basins, so it was a brand-new experience for me,” he said.
A rift basin is a linear zone where the lithosphere is being pulled apart, and Bosworth found such work fascinating.
At the time in the industry, rifts were believed to be relatively subsiding basins – nothing sophisticated.
That was changing.
“A new effort was under way to study extensional settings with the same quantitative and semi-quantitative tools that had been honed in previous decades in contractional settings – thrust belts,” he said.
Looking back, he realizes how fortunate he was to be involved in such a project.
“I was sent to the right place (the best exposures of rift basins in the world) at the right time (active exploration plus a geoscience-wide new emphasis on the details of how rifts really work),” he added.
Camaraderie and Trepidation in Africa
Bosworth is being honored for precisely that work in the area of developing cutting-edge concepts on rift basin evolution and their relationship to petroleum systems in east and northern Africa.
It was there that he and his exploration team discovered the westernmost fields in Egypt’s Western Desert, very close to the Libyan border.
“It’s always a team effort - no single person ever makes a discovery on their own,” he said, “unless they are a geologist, geophysicist, petrophysicist, driller, petroleum engineer and financier all rolled into one.”
The results were part of what he calls “nice” discoveries.
“I call them ‘nice’ because to call them anything else would be a bit of an overstatement,” he said.
Bosworth, a past recipient of the Vlastimila Dvorakova International Ambassador Service Award and an AAPG Distinguished Service Award, said the continuity of the industry has always brought him a sense of camaraderie and joy.
“In Libya I had great fun working with teams that were developing truly major discoveries, made back in the 1960s. Some of the gentlemen involved with those earlier discoveries were still at Marathon when I first joined,” Bosworth related.
Not that working in that part of the world was (or is) ever easy.
“Politics in the Middle East and North Africa have often made oil and gas exploration and production difficult,” he said.
He remembers a time when he was stationed in Cairo with Marathon in 1991, during the first Gulf War.
It was harrowing, even if, eventually, it turned out to be uneventful.
“There was much trepidation about what might happen, even in Egypt, but it never materialized and was quite peaceful,” said Bosworth.
He was in the region, too, during the Arab Spring and Egyptian Revolution in 2011.
“This got a bit touchy,” he said, “and many innocent people were harmed. But our rigs kept running.”
But after the subsequent coup in Egypt in 2013, many of the desert areas became inaccessible for field geologists, particularly foreigners.
The writing was in the sand, so to speak.
“That was pretty much the end of major field expeditions in Egypt for me,” he said.
Well Data to Help with Earthquake Prediction
Bosworth, who has presented more than a hundred talks at major conferences and published at least as many articles in leading journals (including the AAPG Bulletin) – his work has been cited more than 8,400 times – still keeps a close eye on the region and continues to see that continuity. He said his contributions – again, stressing the nod to those who came before or with him and the work they did – generally relied on integration of surface outcrop observations with subsurface well datasets.
This, of course, has significance to oil and gas exploration and production. But something else comes from it.
“Just as importantly (or more so) it has implications for geologic hazard assessments in a region that experiences destructive earthquakes,” he said.
Earthquakes are difficult to predict, and their locations are focused along discrete, active fault systems. But in order to understand the overall tectonics of a region – and the distribution of seismic risk – it is helpful to know the details of both the regional and local crustal stress fields.
“Well data, when properly collected and analyzed, can help fill the data gaps between the seismically active faults,” he said.
Bosworth and his colleagues have taken this integrative approach to help address where and over what time frame destructive earthquakes are likely to occur in this now heavily populated region.
Politics, Red Sea Crust, Other Hot Topics
And any talk about North or East Africa is always a conversation starter.
“I get asked about a million different things about the place, partly depending on who’s asking,” he said.
Rift aficionados, he said, want to know what I think is the nature of the crust in the northern Red Sea, often followed by vitriolic follow-up questions.
Why vitriolic?
The nature of the crust in the northern Red Sea has been a hot topic for decades.
“I have argued based on industry well data that it must at least in part be continental,” said Bosworth, but many academicians have stated it is all oceanic, based on aeromagnetic data (no unique solutions) and other inconclusive data.
And he said he has to be on his A-game when these discussions begin.
“Some of these academicians are very prestigious individuals. It’s a very important problem, with some big reputations on the line,” he said.
You wouldn’t think so, he said, but academicians (and to a lesser extent, some industry folk) tend to get pretty emotional about these “big” questions.
Meanwhile, the questions he gets from students test another part of his intellect: patience.
“Students often ask why we don’t just stop using hydrocarbons as an energy source when so much is said about how bad this is for the environment,” he related.
He understands their frustration.
“This is a tough question to answer, not because we don’t have a viable answer, but because in a few short sentences you have to provide an alternative, scientifically rational view to counter hours of television programs and unending streams of social media,” said Bosworth.
Addicted to the Work
Early in his career and throughout his relationship, AAPG was a source of a great deal of technical information about oil and gas exploration and numerous geologic principles, such as the nature of strike-slip faults, fold and thrust belts, the sedimentary and environments of deltas, just to name a few.
“Eventually, I became more involved with the leadership of the organization, particularly in the Africa Region, and with working with AAPG student members and young professionals,” said Bosworth.
It was a simpler time 20 years ago.
“Years ago, AAPG meetings were my best means of communicating in person with other industry geoscientists. That’s still important, but the rise of the internet and social media has made other means of keeping in touch with colleagues more practical in many respects,” he said.
He said his body of industry and academic mentors, collaborators and friends continues to grow and has surpassed his greatest expectations or wishes.
Drilling wells and finding oil and gas, he’ll tell you, is addictive.
“I don’t think I can stop trying to do this,” he said.
Bosworth, at the moment, is still consulting and is also an affiliated senior research fellow.
He loves the work.
“‘Affiliated’ basically means ‘without pay,’” he said, laughing.
His career – the different continents, uncertainty, danger – has defined both him and his family: his wife, Fadia, and his three sons.
“They put up with too many working-weekends (rigs run 24/7), long trips away from home, and even accompanied me on numerous desert excursions,” said Bosworth.
On those excursions, he did make an important discovery. Fadia didn’t like them, especially after the first sandstorm
“My wife ended her participation at that point,” he said.