Happy Christmas

First of all I would like to wish you and your families a safe and happy Christmas. It should be a bumper year for Santa in our households, given the continued support of the oil price at around US$60 bbl. What a different world it is when, as in Hardman’s case, the staff is facing a Christmas redundancy with a gleam in their eyes as the job offers pile in, mostly unsolicited.

AAPG Conference success

What a great conference! I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. Congratulations and thanks to all who participated in its success. It broke all records for attendance at an AAPG International Conference with 2,630 total registrants. The next best was Rio de Janeiro with 2,214 in 1998. The exhibition was also the largest ever.

PESA took the full risk of running the courses and field trips and we were amazed that we filled seven field trips (where last year in Paris only one got off the ground) and that eight short courses were well attended. Many thanks to all of you who supported these courses and your companies who supported us too. Another success story was the PESA Deal Day which attracted over 120 participants, many thanks to Phil Cooney.

I think it was particularly pleasing that there seemed to be a unanimous feeling that the technical papers and posters were of excellent quality. Thank you to all who put in time to produce a technical presentation or poster.

I thanked most people in last month’s report but I would again like to thank Peter and Robyn Purcell who should be attributed with the conference’s success from the dint of their hard work in association with Rick Fritz and the AAPG International conference team.

Success will bring in extra funds for PESA to use for its operations and for student support. The PESA Board will be considering how best to use these reserves.

Student support

One initiative at the conference was a meeting of those interested in furthering geoscience education in schools and universities. Over dinner, 21 participants shared their ideas and experiences from around Australia.

Louisa Ivey, who is an ex-teacher and geologist and now works as the liaison officer for a PESA WA supported initiative ‘Earth Sciences WA’ encouraged us to use resources like your State’s science teachers’ associations and Scitech to link into the teaching community. Get passionate geologists to go along to their meetings to sell our science to those who teach it. Invite teachers out to PESA meetings or organise field trips for them to nearby well sites. Join forces with organisations like GSA, SPE, AusIMM to sponsor similar educational opportunities for these teachers. The reason for this is simple: it has been shown that students base their career choice on the following three influences in order of importance: teachers, salaries (travel), and parents. The government is doing precious little to support science teachers and it leaves an opportunity for us to make the most of.

Another good point that was raised was that oil companies have always found it difficult to get the ‘clean-green and useful’ message out and we as individuals and as an association are in a much better position as we are not immediately judged.

A good initiative by the Vic/Tas Branch has been to produce a support kit for those of us who go out to schools to talk to kids or teachers about our industry. Its key prop is a perspex block containing an array of oil samples which they are getting made up. You may have seen the advert in the October/November PESA News edition. The kit will also contain posters and rock samples and other presentation material.

Technical papers online

Have you had a look at the new service providing technical papers online yet? You enter the site via the PESA online tool bar on our homepage and then use the search engine on the top of the home page of D8A’s ProfDocs website to locate abstracts that you can view for free. You can then register and for as little as $5 purchase credits for a full paper download via a secure online payment facility. PESA will receive a commission for its papers that are purchased from this system but will not be involved in the management of it. Further volumes are planned to be made available on the system shortly. At last our papers are available to the world.

Holidays

Many of you will be looking forward to a summer holiday and I have just had one. I had a very relaxing and interesting time traveling around the State of Kerala in southwest India. There are two things that are worthy of note. One is that they have an amazingly good education system where a large part of the population is aspiring to go through tertiary education in engineering and science. The result is that Indians, and more specifically Keralans, could be the next wave of scientists who will fill the current void.

The second observation was that millions of people live within a couple of metres of the current sea level on the canals of the Keralan backwaters (see pictures). ‘If’, or rather ‘when’ the sea level rises there is going to be a monumental problem for these people. In the New Year, why don’t we all do our bit to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions? Take responsibility for small actions like cycling to work, switch off unnecessary lights and appliances, switch to fluorescent light bulbs etc. It will not only help to save the planet but it will also save your hip pocket. Just a thought.

Once again have a really great Christmas.

Cheers Dave