• Jurassic Coast Field Trip Review
• Risk Analysis
• Thoughts of an Outgoing Editor
• East Baghdad Field
• PESGB Young Professionals
• Stoneley Lecture Review
• Africa Conference 2010 Review
• Cotswold & Western Group Review

Plus much more inside

President’s Page- Henry Allen

PETEX 2010 will shortly be on us. The signs are that it will be another busy and vibrant event and my thanks go out to everybody on the organising committees and the PESGB office staff for the effort they have put in to delivering this so smoothly. PETEX, besides what it brings to the industry, is one of the financial cornerstones of PESGB which enable us to keep our subscriptions low and fulfil our charitable purpose by providing support to educational activity.
All this fantastic display of science, technology and expertise at PETEX is a far cry from 1959 when my father had an article published in the New Scientist surmising that there may be hydrocarbon potential under the North Sea. Reading between the lines, this was a bit of PR for the then new geological sub-discipline of sedimentology, and a plea to the oil industry to throw its support into the development of geological research and teaching in the UK. This seemed to bear fruit, as I remember the building of the brand new Sedimentological Research Laboratory at the University of Reading in the early sixties, thanks to support from some forward-thinking people in the oil companies of the time. It seems that in those days it was a pioneering approach for the UK’s geological academia to go out in search of major financial support from the oil industry.
Nowadays of course, much co-operation goes on routinely and as an example of this it is great to welcome the Petroleum Geoscience Research Collaboration Conference to PETEX. But the SRL, and indeed the whole Geology Department at Reading has gone into oblivion. I still wonder how that happened, and how engaged most of us have been in thinking about and actively contributing to shaping further education and research so that the industry gets what it needs. Do we for instance take an interest in what is going on in the Higher Education Funding Council for England, who were recently looking for nominations to expert panels, and have we spotted the NERC advert in our very own October Newsletter announcing an online consultation on the NERC Environmental Centres, including the National Geoscience Data Centre? We will ignore such things at our peril.