Canning Basin, Western Australia

One of my first jobs as a new graduate with West Australian Petroleum was conducting gravity surveys with an old Worden gravimeter in the Lennard Shelf area of the Canning Basin in WA’s north. I was fascinated from the beginning by the vastness and romance of the region, and drawn to its history. Throughout my career, the Canning Basin, like Ethiopia’s Ogaden, has been a basin I seem to regularly return to. (God is sending you back until you do it right, my old Whitestone boss Bud Stilley liked to say.)

I worked there again from 1978 to 1990, initially with Whitestone Petroleum and then consulting with P&R. During 1979-80, I was embroiled in the Noonkanbah conflict over land rights and spent several years doing more anthropology than geology. In 1984 the Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia held a symposium on the Canning Basin, and I edited the proceedings volume, The Canning Basin, WA.  

In the early 90s P&R worked with Hunt Oil in the extreme SW Canning where we ‘discovered’ the Waukarlycarly Graben on gravity and seismic data. This was discussed in a 2006 poster and in a 2014 APPEA paper with Norman Alavi of the WA Geological Survey.

In 2006, I presented a poster on the history of exploration for oil in the Canning Basin Devonian reefs to the AAPG International Conference in Perth, and in 2007 I contributed to the session honoring Canning reef expert Phil Playford at AAPG North American Conference, with a talk on the inter-play between geological models and seismic interpretation.

Attachments

The Canning Basin, WA - An Introduction — 1.5 MB PDF File Download
The Seismic Definition of the Main Structural Elements of the Canning Basin — 3.2 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2007 Devonian reefs presentation — 7.9 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2007 Devonian reefs script — 249.1 KB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Devonian reefs poster- panel 1 — 3.1 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Devonian reefs poster- panel 2 — 4.7 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Devonian reefs poster- panel 3 — 4.5 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Devonian reefs poster- panel 4 — 3.7 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Devonian reefs poster- panel 5 — 3.8 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Waukarlycarly Graben poster - panel 1 — 4.3 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Waukarlycarly Graben poster - panel 2 — 8.6 MB PDF File Download
AAPG 2006 Waukarlycarly Graben poster - panel 3 — 9 MB PDF File Download
Lower paleozoic stratigraphy and petroleum potential of the Wallal Rift System, SW Canning Basin, Western Australia. — 1.1 MB PDF File Download