PESA WA Branch Evening Lecture Series

In addition to the successful PESA WA Branch Technical Luncheon Series held this year, the Evening Lecture Series has been going very well too. Our Evening Lecture Series is a great platform for networking over canapes and drinks accompanied by a technical talk in a very relaxed environment. The event usually starts around 5.30pm at The Georges Hotel.

The first evening lecture that PESA WA hosted this year was on 17 April with Chris Cubitt as the guest lecturer. His topic was on the “Drill cuttings, core, wireline and seismic – a match made in heaven!” and the event was a great learning experience, in many ways. For our international guests they learned a new slang abbreviation some had not previously heard. That of “thino” referring to a “thin section”. Many in the audience had previously worked with Chris in his early days while he was still in Perth, and after so many years away working in Europe and the States, it is nice to be able to host him when his business travels bring him briefly back “home”.

Natalie Debenham was our second guest lecturer on 7 June and she presented the work-in-progress for her PhD thesis titled “The permeability structure of fault zones in sedimentary basins”, which went extremely well and she was able to connect with her distant relation PESA WA’s President Helen Debenham. Natalie’s talk, which showed us detailed outcrop based analysis and findings across a fault, made us realise how variable the earth can be under our drill bit, on scales that cannot be easily determined from seismic, and reinvigorated the ongoing discussion of faults that seal vs faults that leak.

Simon Molyneux’s talk on “Hydrocarbon volumetrics – it’s not that hard, is it?” on 4 September attracted a sell-out audience, with several guests having to stand at the back, Simon proceeded to go through with us, not only an account of the many different ways that volumetrics can be calculated, from historical methods to those that require high powered computers, but also got us to use our own internal computers in some interactive estimation games, hosted through an online anonymous voting app we were all able to use from our smart phones. With more than 70% of the audience participating we were able to see that most of us were pretty on the ball when estimating averages from familiar rock properties graphs, but no-where near as good at estimating the number of marbles in the two jars Simon brought along. We also demonstrated, in the failed attempt to prove suggestion bias in answering questions, that we are also a fairly independently minded lot. All of which I think bodes well for the future of oil and gas exploration in Australia.

The next event will be on the 25 October. We will have the pleasure of hosting Kevin Hill as the guest lecturer and he will be presenting on the “Innovative exploration in Papua New Guinea – past, present and future”. Kevin Hill will also be give a four-day course on “Structural geology and seismic in petroleum exploration and production”. Check out the events page on the website for more information! To book for his course click HERE, and for the evening talk HERE.

We would like to take this opportunity to encourage our members to attend our evening lectures and to nominate themselves or someone they to become a guest speaker in this slightly more relaxed atmosphere compared with our lunches.

Visit the events page to see the latest branch activities and login to receive member discounts.

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