Nicholas Boutakoff

Nicholas Boutakoff, the man credited with guiding Woodside  Energy NL to their rich oil and gas fields on Australia’s North West Shelf was born Nikolas Alexandrovich Butakov in 1903, a Russian aristocrat with ancestors of royal and high military rank stretching back centuries.  

 I became interested in Boutakoff’s story while editing PESA’s North West Shelf volume in 1984, when I realized how little detail was known about him.   I collected information and photographs from some of his colleagues and friends in Melbourne and eventually found his extensive papers in the State Library of Victoria. A few years ago, I met Mike Butcher and Yolande Collins, who were also collecting biographical information on Boutakoff, and we have collaborated ever since. Yolande was Boutakoff’s goddaughter, and saw him often as she grew up in Australia. 

 We’ve made presentations to the Australian Mining History Association Conference in Beechworth, Victoria and also to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists International Conference in Cartagena, Columbia. The presentation and typescript from the AAPG presentation are available below. An Extended Abstract of the AAPG 2013 presentation is available on the AAPG Search and Discovery website as S&D Record 70152 and is also available below.  Our research has moved on considerably since these publications, but plans for a larger work have been overtaken by time and other projects. In due course, additional material will be added to this page and stored with Battye Library as a future resource for others.

 Nicholas Boutakoff, as he called himself in later life, lost his father and family fortune to the Russian Revolution. After schooling in Cannes, he attended the University of Louvain in Belgium, earning a PhD on Alpine geology. He worked in Kivu, East Africa (1929-35) and then in Trinidad (1937-48) before joining the Victorian Geological Survey in 1948. He had a lifelong interest in global tectonics, which he interpreted as Earth’s response to perturbations in its rotational speed.  Boutakoff was always looking for a business opportunity to make his fortune and he thought he’d found it when he took his ideas about the oil potential of Australia’s North West Shelf to Woodside in 1962. Unfortunately, a bitter dispute developed over payment for those ideas, with Woodside denying the existence of the verbal agreement that Boutakoff claimed to have made with them.  He died in 1977.

Attachments

AAPG ICE 2013: Nicholas Boutakoff and Australia's North West Shelf - Presentation. — 1.6 MB PDF File Download
AAPG ICE 2013: Nicholas Boutakoff and Australia's North West Shelf - Typescript. — 340.6 KB PDF File Download
Extended Abstract - Nicholas Boutakoff and Australia's North West Shelf. — 868.3 KB PDF File Download
Nicholas Boutakoff: A geologist's life revisited. — 488.9 KB PDF File Download
Boutakoff Beechworth Conference Presentation (Text). — 67.2 KB PDF File Download
Boutakoff Beechworth Conference Presentation (Slides). — 4.5 MB PDF File Download