Joe Versfelt attended the University of Texas at Austin (BS Geology) and Duke University (MS Geology), with MS Thesis was on the effect of basement structural inheritance on rift tectonics and rift basin architecture. Joe started his career in 1984 by working the East African Rift Valley lake systems, in an industry consortium research team acquiring the first ever seismic data there. He then started with Texaco. He has held both Geophysicist and Geologist positions at Texaco, CMS-Nomeco, Alberta Energy (AEC) / EnCana, and Occidental. Joe was International Exploration Manager at El Paso. Since joining Apache in 2010 he has served as Region Exploration Manager in Argentina and Egypt.

Joe has worked on exploration and development projects in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Angola, Gabon, Cameroon, Trinidad, Caspian/CIS, SE Asia, China’s Bohai and East China Sea, Gulf of Thailand, Colombia, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Congo Brazzaville, Eritrea, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt. Joe has worked in rift, passive margin, cratonic sag, and mountain- foreland type basins, with oil and gas discoveries. Additionally, Joe worked in unconventional resource play development, evaluating through the drill bit acreage positions in several Neuquén Basin shale plays such as the Vaca Muerta Fm and drilling Latin America’s first horizontal multi-frac shale well.