VIC/TAS PESA-SPE-ASEG joint Christmas Lunch and Talk 2022

Guest Speaker(s): Errol Johnstone

Errol Johnstone started his geoscience career with Delhi Petroleum in 1981 in the Cooper Basin. Following the acquisition of Delhi by Esso in 1988, Errol has had a distinguished international career with ExxonMobil over 30 years in a variety of exploration and appraisal roles, both here in Australia and overseas with particular emphasis on new ventures, basin analysis and new play generation.

During the 1990’s he was the team lead geoscientist for the Russian new ventures effort in Houston and was involved with the Sakhalin 1 offshore project, where a major oil leg discovery was defined at Chayvo that was important to XOM for many years.

Mr Johnstone is one of the industry’s experts in Structural Geology, Regional Geologic synthesis, Sequence Stratigraphy and 2D/3D Seismic Interpretation. He has extensive experience in multi-disciplinary regional taskforce studies, working with Russian, Japanese, Malaysian and Indonesian geoscientists and has also been active in teaching structural geology and sequence stratigraphy disciplines on field schools and mentoring XOM’s new geoscience staff.

Errol joined MEO Australia in 2010 with responsibility for building a new exploration acreage portfolio through  new ventures work from the Middle East, through SE Asia to Australia/PNG, focussing primary on compressional fold belt terrains and difficult interpretation regimes in order to identify overlooked potential.

He is currently the Chief Geoscientist at Melbana Energy, primarily responsible for new acreage acquisition efforts through gazettal applications and farmin evaluations.

During a ventures trip to Cuba  in 2013, he was involved with securing the Block 9 onshore PSC, and together with his brother Dean Johnstone, used the existing legacy Cuban data to construct   the seismic and well interpretation, and structural analysis model for the North Cuban Foldbelt that has ultimately led to the Alameda oil discovery.