Howard Johnson

Howard Johnson

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Howard Johnson is the Shell Professor of Petroleum Geology at Imperial College London, a position that he has held since 1993. He has extensive experience in the petroleum industry, including research, exploration and production geology and petroleum engineering. He spent 15 years with Shell, including almost 5 years with SSB/SSPC in Miri. From 2002 to 2004 he was seconded to PETRONAS Carigali, where he held the full-time position of Geology Custodian in the Exploration Division. He continues to work as a technical geoscience advisor to PETRONAS.

He has wide experience in delivering technical courses for petroleum industry professionals, including Development Geology, Reservoir Characterisation and Sedimentology and industry-focused fieldtrips to various locations around the world, including NW Borneo. Professor Johnson has published over 60 technical papers and he is a member of several professional bodies, including the AAPG, SPE, the PESGB and the Geological Society of London. He is an experienced external university examiner both in the UK and overseas, including the University of Malaya and the University of Malaysia Sabah. He was awarded the 2012 AAPG Grover E. Murray Memorial Distinguished Educator Award and the 2012 Rector’s Award for Teaching Excellence at Imperial College London.

Professor Johnson received a Bachelor of Science in Geology from the University of Liverpool and went on to receive a D.Phil. in Sedimentology from the University of Oxford. He was a Royal Society European Research Fellow at the University of Leiden and a research fellow at the University of East Anglia. His research interests are in clastic sedimentology and reservoir characterization.

 

Abstracts

  • 24100 Understanding the stratigraphic fill and reconstructing the palaeo-hydrology of incised valleys can help to constrain those factors that controlled their origin, evolution and regional significance. This condition is addressed through the analysis of a large (up to 18 km wide by 80 m deep) and exceptionally well-imaged Late Pleistocene incised valley from the Sunda Shelf (South China Sea) based on shallow three-dimensional seismic data from a large (11 500 km2), ‘merge’ survey, supplemented with site survey data (boreholes and seismic). This approach has enabled the characterization of the planform geometry, cross-sectional area and internal stratigraphic architecture, which together allow reconstruction of the palaeo-hydrology. The valley-fill displays five notable stratigraphic features: (i) it is considerably larger than other seismically resolvable channel forms and can be traced for at least 180 km along its length; (ii) it is located in the axial part of the Malay Basin; (iii) the youngest part of the valley-fill is dominated by a large (600 m wide and 23 m deep), high-sinuosity channel, with well-developed lateral accretion surfaces; (iv) the immediately adjacent interfluves contain much smaller, dendritic channel systems, which resemble tributaries that drained into the larger incised valley system; and (v) a 16 m thick, shell-bearing, Holocene clay caps the valley-fill. The dimension, basin location and palaeohydrology of this incised valley leads to the conclusion that it represents the trunk river, which flowed along the length of the Malay Basin; it connected the Gulf of Thailand in the north with the South China Sea in the south-east. The length of the river system (>1200 km long) enables examination of the upstream to downstream controls on the evolution of the incised valley, including sea-level, climate and tectonics. The valley size, orientation and palaeohydrology suggest close interaction between the regional tectonic framework, low-angle shelf physiography and a humid-tropical climatic setting. The presentation will be concluded by considering how some of these concepts might be applied to other fluvial systems in SE Asia, including those that form petroleum reservoirs. Plio-Pleistocene Rivers on the Sunda Shelf: Concepts and Implications for Fluvial Depositional Systems in SE Asia
    Plio-Pleistocene Rivers on the Sunda Shelf: Concepts and Implications for Fluvial Depositional Systems in SE Asia

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