PESA WA Perth Basin Field Trip – stromatolites, coal seams and wild flowers

Guest Speaker(s): Darren Ferdinando (BasinScience) and Amely Allgoewer (MGPalaeo)

Darren Ferdinando gained his BSc (Hons) & PhD from the University of Western Australia. He initially worked for the GSWA before moving to explore the Perth Basin with Arc Energy. After a successful period with Arc, he then took up an offer he could not refuse, joining Murphy Oil’s newly opened Australia office and worked across the Browse, Bonaparte and Perth Basins, as well as New Zealand’s offshore basins, the Great Australian Bight and the Vulcan Sub-basin. After Murphy Oil circled the wagons, closed the Perth office and headed back to Houston in 2019, he started his own consultancy, Basin Science, which specialises in regional play mapping across Australian Basins. From 2021 he worked with with Geoscience Australia as a Resource Assessment Specialist focusing on play mapping of conventional and unconventional resources, carbon capture & storage sites and identifying areas for hydrogen generation and storage over eastern Australian basins. Darren was recently appointed as the Exploration Manager for Perth Basin focused exploration company Talon Energy. He has run a number of field trips for PESA to the northern Perth Basin over the decades and also runs the PESA-WA Sedimentology and Stratigraphy Interest Group (SSIG) meetings roughly once every two months at the GSWA Core Library looking at a varied assortment of core from across Western Australia’s sedimentary basins.

Amely Allgoewer joined MGPalaeo in July 2015 after spending 9 years as a clastic stratigrapher within the petroleum industry in the UK and Australia. After finishing her degree in sedimentology (MSc equiv.) at the university of Tübingen, Germany, in 2006 Amely crossed the channel and started her career as a sedimentologist with Ichron Ltd., UK working on clastic reservoirs of the North Sea (UK and Norway) and Central Europe. In 2011, Amely decided to dodge the rain and moved to Australia to work with Chevron Energy Technology Company (ETC). During her time at Chevron, Amely worked predominantly on fluvial, shallow-marine and deltaic reservoirs of the Mungaroo Formation, deep-marine systems of the Barrow Formation, as well as Late Jurassic sandstones of the Jansz-Io Field.  Since joining MGPalaeo, Amely’s main focus has been detailed core descriptions with a passion for ichnology in a large variety of depositional environments including various deepwater settings, shallow marine shoreface and deltaics to terrestrial deposits ranging from the Late Carboniferous to Late Cretaceous from the Perth Basin to the Timor Sea. She also enjoys the preparation and presenting of MGPalaeo’s core workshops, gathering data for multi-client core studies, and joining Darren on the northern Perth Basin field trips.