I was pleased and surprised to win the best paper (exploration category) at the 2014 PETEX conference. The presentation was on “Unlocking Arctic Resources: New realities and Future Perspectives”, I which I discussed both the potential petroleum resources of the Arctic, and the social and environmental consequences of exploring for them. The talk was a distillation of some of the thinking by my colleagues and myself that happened during the assembly of Statoil’s “Circum-Arctic Regional Prospectivity Atlas”, shown in the photo.

The surprise was genuine, as I gave the talk in the morning just after disembarking the plane from Houston – so it was delivered in a fog of jet-lag. Maybe I should do that every time. If you’d like to see for yourself, the video is below.

PETEX is a bi-annual event, and is the largest subsurface-focussed global conference and exhibition in the UK.