contentsFrom Geologist To Ultra-marathon Runner, Ikon Geophysicist Stares Death In Face
For all the hype of travelling the globe in the oil and gas industry, it can also be distinctly life-threatening.
It didn't occur to Ikon Science's Fractured Reservoir/VSP (vertical seismic profile) imaging expert Simon Emsley that he would be a target when he was undertaking a seismic survey in South East Turkey (Kurdistan) barely a month after anti-Western terrorists levelled the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001 courtesy of two hijacked commercial planes.
For Emsley, who had just taken up "serious" distance running, his newly acquired skills were of little use when about 30 armed men "with lots of guns" appeared out of nowhere while he and an American colleague were driving through a deserted village and, after a curt command of "you're coming with us", kidnapped them at gunpoint.
"The first 15 minutes were the worst – we assumed we were going to get shot and dumped on the mountainside", said Emsley, who was in Perth in October 2011 for a PESA luncheon as part of a whirlwind two-week tour through southeast Asia.
"I never thought about myself being a target – especially in such a derelict village. I didn't think that was ever going to happen."
They were rescued after about four hours by the intervention of the army who were supposed to be keeping tabs on him as he was carrying explosives that they didn't want to end up in the wrong hands.
He never found out who was responsible, and needed nerves of steel over the next three weeks to complete the survey.
"We were on edge for the rest of the time I was there", he remembered.
"There's a lot of interest in the sort of things you get to do in this job, but there are also a lot of challenges.
"In the 20 – odd years I've been in the industry I've travelled a lot, and have worked from Seattle to Tokyo to the northern tip of Scotland, and as far south as Johannesburg. I have worked in at least two war zones, been kidnapped once and been mock bombed just outside Beirut.
"One year I worked in the Arabian Gulf in temperatures over 50°C in summer, and I did the same sort of survey at 3500 m doing a survey in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan at -34°C. So you get to see a lot of things and deal with a lot of challenges – some are things you don't exactly want to be faced with.
"It's both interesting and challenging – I've been places that many people would never go."
That said, he said it's best to try not to think about the danger in the region when he's in a trouble spot.
A local working on a site got shot when he worked on the border between Tanzania and Rwanda-Burundi, which was a war zone rife with internal conflicts, with refugees pouring across the borders. He said the shooting appeared to be "some sort of inter-tribal thing".
Emsley, a leading thinker on micro-seismology, VSP imaging and (micro)gravity whose work has mainly focused on unconventional reservoirs like fractured carbonates and basement rocks, has continued to run ... and run. For the past five years he has contested the gruelling 89 km Comrades marathon, having first taken up running in college for leisure in his free time.
Even this seemingly comparatively safe past time has caused him grief. In November 2011 he was run over while out on a training run in Houston and ending up with fractured ribs.
He trains up to 3–4000 miles a year to train for The Comrades, a punishing race that alternates from Durban to Pietermaritzburg then vice versa which, for some, has taken on profound meaning.
"It is here, stripped of any of society's false privileges, that he finds no hiding place, no shelter of convenience. Face to face with himself he must look deep inside", said one runner. "These miles,' wrote another, "will challenge everything he holds dear, his value system, his lifestyle. They will ask nothing less than his view of the universe."
Having started running half-marathons in 2000, then upping the ante to 42 km marathons, a friend wanted a training buddy to train for the famous South African 56 km Two Oceans Marathon. At the time, he was based just west of London. Having realised he had already done the training, he went ahead and did it. Then he contemplated The Comrades, also in South Africa, what he not-lightly describes as the most famous "ultra-distance" marathon, and he thought, "I suppose I'd better do it".
So tough is the race, however, that upon finishing it, organisers told him, "you're not a proper Comrade runner until you've done both ways". Having replied "thanks very much", he promptly went ahead and returned for more punishment the next year. He's now done five.
But his work and travel schedule make it tough to train. When he's not travelling, there are always after-work meetings in Houston, where he's been based on a two-year secondment for Ikon since July 2011, and it can still get up to 110 F (~36°C).
Then there is the travel.
"You get home, you're jet-lagged, you're just so tired you don't want to get up first thing in the morning for a six-mile run when it's 35°C as well (in Houston)", he said.
The best way to get over it, he said, is to pretend the travelling never happened and get right back on the horse, so to speak.
When he spoke to PESA News Resources, he had spent two days in London, then three days in Kuala Lumpur, before a day in Bangkok, then three days in Ho Chi Minh, back to Kuala Lumpur then three days in Jakarta then to Perth, all in the space of two weeks. In that time, he only got one run in – back in London, with some old running buddies.
There are about 25 running clubs and businesses that are affiliated to the Houston Area Road Runners Association, but at the time he was running on his own. "It's always better to run with people when you train as you have the ability for them to carry you along and you have that commitment to run with somebody. It's much more motivational", he said.
As intense as the commitment is, his passion has always been the oil and gas industry, though his fondness for geology started when he dug up some fossils in his parents' backyard in Surrey as a five-year-old. From that moment, his interest in geology was encouraged by his parents – neither of whom were involved in the industry. His mother did not work after he was born and his father was a chartered surveyor.
When he completed his BSc in Geology at London University in 1983, the bottom had just fallen out of the oil price and "nobody was hiring ", so he went sideways, completing a PhD in micro-seismology at the University of Wales, then spent 20 years working in fractured reservoir imaging and modelling before joining Ikon.
At Ikon, Emsley leads the fracture imaging initiative and works globally designing and processing VSP data for basement and fractured carbonate reservoirs; and shale gas prospects, also developing integrated programs for characterising fractured reservoirs. He has also conducted micro-seismic modelling studies and automated fault extraction from 3D seismic data.
