A new, specially funded, designated speaker has been added to the prestigious AAPG Distinguished Lecture program for the 2012-13 season.
The Shell Distinguished Lectureship, made possible through a recent generous contribution by Shell to the AAPG Foundation, will annually endow a speaker who will initially focus on petroleum geology topics related to Canada, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
The inaugural Shell Distinguished Lecturer will be Art Saller, stratigrapher and exploration geologist for Cobalt International Energy in Houston.
Saller was selected – as all Shell Lecturers will be – by a five-member sub-committee of the Distinguished Lecture Committee, which will organize the Shell Distinguished Lecture tour. That group includes the group’s co-vice chairs plus three people representing North America, international Regions and Shell, respectively.
Saller will travel later this fall, with tour details yet to be announced.
During his 28 years in the petroleum industry, Saller, an AAPG member who has taught short courses for the Association, has done research and provided stratigraphic support for exploration and production projects in west Texas, Canada, Angola, Indonesia and many other locations.
He also has published numerous papers on carbonate sedimentology and deepwater siliciclastic systems as well as helped edit books.
In 2007, he was part of an exploration team that was given Chevron’s Chairman’s Award for oil discoveries in offshore Angola.
He also has helped run field trips to the Caicos Platform (Bahamas), Belize and the Permian Basin for Cities Service/Occidental, Unocal, Chevron, university geology groups and the Nautilus Training Consortium.
When announced as a 2012-13 DL speaker earlier this year he had four talks to offer groups:
- Controls on Hydrothermal Dolomites and Their Reservoir Properties.
- Diagenetic Evolution of Porosity in Carbonates During Burial.
- Sequence Stratigraphy of Classic Carbonate Outcrops in West Texas and Southeast New Mexico With Subsurface Analogs.
- Pleistocene Shelf-to-Basin Depositional Systems, Offshore East Kalimantan, Indonesia: Insights Into Deepwater Slope Channels and Fans.
AAPG’s DL program, funded largely by the AAPG Foundation, is the Association’s flagship initiative for spreading the latest in science, technology and professional information.
The nine DL speakers for 2012-13 North American tours (including the AAPG Ethics Lecturer) were [PFItemLinkShortcode|id:1982|type:standard|anchorText:announced in the August EXPLORER|cssClass:|title:Speakers Announced for N.A. Lecture Tours|PFItemLinkShortcode]. The international DL roster has yet to be announced.