Meet Dr. Mary Barrett, AAPG DEG president-elect for 2017-18.
Barrett, a sedimentary and petroleum geologist with professional backgrounds in both academia and industry, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas, and her doctorate in geology from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
Barrett’s professional experience with Mobil Oil included hydrocarbon generation and migration studies; log and core integration analyses; and assisting production teams in reservoir stratigraphy and properties within mature petroleum fields.
She became a geology professor at Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, in 1992.
She also served as a consultant to independent exploration companies concerning the Austin Chalk, Eagle Ford and Woodbine formations of southeast Texas, and the Smackover Formation of Alabama and Arkansas. She and co-author John Goodson received the A. I. Levorsen Outstanding Paper Award in 2007 from the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies for their Woodbine work.
In the mid-1990s she added an interest in old hydrocarbon fields and their technical history and began the study of the history of oilfield wastes in America. She has presented and published papers concerning oilfield waste and the associated impacts and geochemical signatures, and in 2000 she received the DEG Outstanding Oral Presentation Award for her paper about reconstructing the waste history of the Smackover Field, Arkansas.
Barrett served as the DEG secretary-treasurer from 2003-05 and as a board member of the Petroleum History Institute from 2006-11. In 2012 she was awarded PHI’s Samuel T. Pees “Keeper of the Flame” Award for her research and preservation work in the history of the petroleum industry.
Today she is professor emeriti of geology at Centenary College of Louisiana, and also a consulting geologist with interests in oilfield waste history and impacts.