Sheila Doherty, JX Nippon Exploration & Production
Vice President

The PESGB is worthy of all of our time as geoscientists, whether we just attend the occasional monthly lecture and stay for a beer and a chat, or whether we take a more formal role on the council. I am in the fortunate position of currently having more time to spend on the PESGB and so I thought it might be the right occasion to give something back to the Society and the industry which has provided me with so many fascinating years.

I am currently living and working in London – for JX Nippon and have been for 4 years. This is a bit of an anomaly as my working life has taken my family and me from Cape Town, to The Hague, Oslo, Stavanger and now here. Probably a familiar trajectory for many of you (except maybe Cape Town), but one continuous thread through all this moving about has been societies like the PESGB, which keep one connected with what’s happening in the industry.  I can’t say that I have any particular skills which would recommend me to the position of Vice President, except maybe enthusiasm and an ability to get things done. I was President of the Dutch sister society to the PESGB, the PGK, for a year in 2007 and I enjoyed it very much. I was sorry to have to cut the experience short when I moved to Norway, and I believe the rest of the committee was sorry as well – at least that’s what they said!

I am a geologist by training, having studied hard rock geology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and entered the oil industry by default because the mining houses would not employ female geologists in the 1980’s. I spent 11 years working for Soekor on the basins offshore South Africa and was fortunate to be involved with the Bureau of Economic Geology in Austin Texas in the years when seismic sequence stratigraphy was cutting edge science.  From there I moved to the Netherlands and worked for Clyde, Gulf Canada, Conoco, ConocoPhillips and Wintershall without having to change company or colleagues. Better times than now – but especially in tough times we have to put in the extra effort, hence this candidacy.

Visit pesgb.org.uk/election/ to cast your vote now!
Polls close on Tuesday 29 November
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