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President’s Page- Jon Gluyas

It is a little over a year since PESGB Past President Professor Bob Stoneley died. As most of you will be aware Bob’s career spanned both the petroleum industry and academia and he was instrumental in creating links between the two with development of the JAPEC training courses.
Bob was both eminent and prominent and indeed his name is writ in stone – Stoneley Point lies at the entrance to Whisky Bay on N James Ross Island in Antarctica. There are few petroleum geoscientists today who can match Bob’s prominence and eminence and yet both the current and past membership of the PESGB can boast a significant contribution to wealth creating across the globe and improved understanding of the earth. Why is this so?
We may struggle to answer the question ‘why’ but that does not preclude us from trying to rectify or at least improve the situation. Your PESGB Council has in recent months been considering ‘big ideas’. One such idea was generated by VP Jim Henderson. Jim suggested that it may be possible to develop an annual lecture series which is open to the public and is sufficiently attractive for us to be able to pack a large auditorium. Clearly any such lecture would need to address petroleum and geoscience in some form and be delivered by a well known, authoritative and captivating speaker. Moreover the first speaker in such a series would need to be exceptional. Council warmed to the idea that such an event could create a positive profile for the PESGB in a similar fashion to the way in which the Royal Institution has used its lecture series.
In order to deliver this in 2010 the search is now on for a speaker and a name for the event. I am pleased to be able to report that Julian Rush of ITN News has agreed to be the inaugural speaker. Julian has a number of qualities and skills which make him an ideal speaker. He is well known to the public, he is currently completing a degree in geoscience with the OU and
significantly he performed with aplomb at PGC VII where he refereed the debate between David Jenkins and Jerry Leggett.
Julian and Jim Henderson are now developing the topic for the lecture which is likely to address the media and the industry in the light of what our industry has delivered to the people of the UK and other countries. The speaker is critical, the topic important but it is often the name of the event that will live on in people’s memories –‘the Barbican meetings’, ‘the Ashes’ and so on – when the content has been forgotten. Lest we should forget one of the great petroleum geosciencists from our recent past we have chosen to name the series, ‘The PESGB Stoneley Lecture’. We will let you know when and where the first PESGB Stoneley Lecture will occur.