The Upstream Petroleum Industry; Tasmania’s Position

The global petroleum industry is divided into the ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ components. Tasmania has a small intermittent upstream exploration and ‘invisible’ production industry via two offshore pipelines from Bass Strait to Victoria. The downstream transportation, refining and marketing is supported by the shipment of refined products to Tasmanian ports.

Oil, condensate and  gas is produced from the Yolla field 100 km north of Burnie in central Bass Basin and is piped to Lang Lang southeast  of Melbourne. Gas is also produced from the Thylacine field in Otway Basin northwest of King Island and is piped to Port Campbell in eastern Victoria. The Trefoil gas discovery 40 km west of Yolla is planned for development.

While the export of petroleum products is modest, the ‘export’ of geological  and engineering knowledge to the global upstream industry has been significant. The history of Tasmanian’s contributions is best taken from the late Prof S. W. Carey in the 1930’s, via the Yolla discovery in 1985 to the present, with insights into the future both locally and globally.

John K Davidson:

John graduated from the University of Tasmania in 1969 with a BSc (Hons) degree in Geology.

He worked for Exxon from 1970 to 1980 in Sydney, Exxon’s research centre in Houston , and Esso UK in London before returning to Sydney as exploration project leader of the Esso/BHP Exmouth Plateau deepwater drilling programme.

He has been a worldwide consultant since 1980 and farmed out two wells to Amoco in the Bass Basin which resulted in the Yolla oil and gas discovery in 1985.

In 2000 he patented a method for determining Earth stresses from interpreted seismic surveys. The method provides solutions to many technical challenges in the oil exploration and production industries such as planning horizontal well trajectories to avoid wellbore collapse.

Antarctica: Frozen not Frigid

The common perception of the Antarctica continent is that is frozen and unmovable. Over the last two decades, remote fieldwork and technological advances have yielded geodetic datasets that show that much of Antarctica may be frozen but it far from unmovable. Rather, the ice sheet and the bedrock it sits upon are highly dynamic. GPS measurements of ice sheet motion show changes on timescales of minutes to hours to decades, while even more precise measurements of bedrock motion shows rapid and prolonged response to Earthquakes and glacier thinning. This presentation will highlight how measuring Antarctica’s response to a series of great natural experiments has given new insights into fundamental processes that are active within the ice sheet and solid Earth. They allow us to be better prepared to predict the future of the great ice sheet as it becomes increasingly unfrozen.

University of Tasmania, Glacier researcher Professor Matt King. Picture: Peter Mathew

Professor Matt King:

Matt started focusing on Antarctica during his PhD at the University of Tasmania, where he quantified multi-decadal changes in the motion of a large floating Antarctic ice shelf using surveying data. He then moved to the UK where he researched the application of GPS positioning to understanding subsidence of offshore platforms, glacial dynamics, Earth deformation and Antarctica’s contribution to recent sea-level change. He has travelled to both Antarctica and Greenland and published over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, including several in the leading journals Science and Nature. In late 2012 he returned to the University of Tasmania as Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of Polar Geodesy. In 2015 the Royal Society (London) awarded him the Kavli Medal and Lecture.

The two speakers who will be presenting lectures are:

Professor James Vickers, Wicking Dementia Centre:

Disease modification and risk reduction: new approaches to tackling dementia and

Professor Alison Venn, Deputy Director of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research:

Investigating the childhood origins of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes

Professor James Vickers: Disease modification and risk reduction: new approaches to tackling dementia.

With the ageing of the world-wide population and the lack of effective therapeutic interventions, the numbers of people with dementia will increase dramatically over the next few decades. There are a number of diseases that cause dementia, the majority of which are degenerative and progressive, involving specific pathological changes in the brain on the background of ageing. Once substantial neuronal degeneration has occurred, it is not likely that this pathology can be reversed. Hence, there is substantial research interest currently in slowing or eliminating pathology at the very earliest stages of disease, potentially before overt symptoms, or targeting modifiable risk factors throughout life to delay dementia. The Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre is working at identifying the earliest brain changes that lead to dementia as well as new approaches to inhibit such pathology. The Centre also has a major interventional project, the Tasmanian Healthy Brain Project, investigating whether complex mental stimulation in mid to later life may help reduce ageing-related cognitive decline and risk of dementia. In addition, we are undertaking laboratory studies on how cognitive enrichment may boost brain plasticity.

James Vickers holds the positions of Chair of Pathology, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Health and Co-Director of the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre at the University of Tasmania. His qualifications include a Bachelor of Science, PhD and Doctor of Science. He is also currently a board member of the Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation, Chair of the Scientific Panel for the Alzheimer’s Australia Dementia Research Foundation and President of the Australasian Neuroscience Society.

Professor Alison Venn: Investigating the childhood origins of (adult) cardiovascular disease and diabetes

Professor Alison Venn is an epidemiologist and Deputy Director of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research. Her interests are in the epidemiology of chronic disease with a particular focus on obesity and lifestyle risk factors. She leads the Childhood Determinants of Adult Health Study – a national follow-up of 8,500 Australian children investigating childhood influences on cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk in adulthood, and is an investigator on a major US-funded collaboration pooling similar data from 40,000 children across three countries.

Wednesday 11 November, 6.30 pm Sir Stanley Burbury Theatre, UTAS, Churchill Avenue, Sandy Bay (entry from Churchill Avenue)

All interested people are welcome.  Free admission.

Natural mineral pigments are significant in Aboriginal Australian culture, and applied to a variety of natural matrices such as wood and bark to create objects such as boomerangs and shields and bark paintings. Ochre (Fe-oxide pigment), is used for a variety of red, brown, orange and yellow colours and other natural mineral pigments such as kaolinite are used for white colours. Mixtures and applications of pigments present a challenging analytical problem, especially towards the non-destructive elemental analysis of mixed pigments on objects with a variety of shapes and sizes.

This presentation will describe our recent research into methods to characterize the complexity of Indigenous Australian ochre pigments. We have studied ochre from several known ochre sources around Australia by several techniques, including neutron activation analysis (NAA), X-ray fluorescence microscopy and near-IR spectroscopy. The combination of these techniques offers insight into the complex mineralogy and elemental composition of these natural materials.

Our results demonstrate the advantages of non-destructive analysis and sensitive methods towards the analysis of Aboriginal Australian objects. This presentation will cover some of our recent work including the first non-destructive study of natural pigments on Aboriginal Australian objects directly at a synchrotron, micro-characterisation of mineral pigments and provenance studies with Australian ochre.

Rachel Popelka-Filcoff is an Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) Senior Research Fellow in the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences at Flinders University.

Her research program uses radio-analytical and spectroscopic methods for the application to cultural, environmental and forensic questions. Her work is to the first comprehensive characterisation of Australian Aboriginal natural mineral pigments on cultural heritage materials, including ochre, by several advanced analytical methods. She also analyses uranium materials by a variety of methods for international nuclear forensics projects.

A significant portion of her research is based at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), as well as collaborations with other forensic and cultural heritage institutes and universities. Rachel holds a BA in Archaeology and Classics from Washington University in St Louis (USA), a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Missouri (USA), and completed a National Research Council postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, USA).

She has received awards for her research including the South Australian Tall Poppy of the Year in 2012, which recognises to top early career researcher in the state. She has also had her research profiled in several scientific and general media outlets such as Cosmos Magazine, Chemistry in Australia, and Chemistry World, and several radio interviews.

Rachel is the Vice President/President Elect of the Society for Archaeological Sciences, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. She is on the executive committee for the Early and Mid Career Research Forum for the Australian Academy of Science.

Wednesday 4 November, 8.00 pm Royal Society Room, Customs House Building, TMAG,
19 Davey St. Hobart (entry from Dunn Place)
All interested people are welcome.  Free admission.