Geoscience Australia’s Dr Marita Bradshaw won APPEA’s Lewis G Weeks Gold Medal. This award recognises an outstanding contribution to the development of the petroleum exploration and production industry in Australia, and Bradshaw was the first woman to win this prestigious award in its 21-year history.

APPEA chief executive Belinda Robinson said Bradshaw has worked tirelessly to understand the petroleum potential of Australia and to convey that understanding to petroleum exploration companies around the world.

“Her enthusiasm, passion, and commitment have helped promote Australia’s petroleum potential to a large national and international audience, and have especially helped in the search for new petroleum provinces in the offshore areas of the country,” Robinson said.

“She has always had a passion for the under-explored and frontier provinces of Australia, maintaining a high level of optimism in the face of some difficult geology. She is also a great communicator, as well as a mentor and educator to less experienced geoscientists.”

The second award given for the individual achievement was the Tony Noon Memorial Scholarship, awarded to an outstanding honours year student studying in a relevant field.

The winner was Hamed Saroush who is studying for his PhD in Petroleum Engineering at Curtin University’s department of petroleum engineering. His research proposal title is "Experimental and numerical modelling of cavity evolution in sand production process".

The JN Pierce Award for excellence in the way the upstream oil and gas industry is reported in the media was given to Ian Howarth for his article in The Australian Financial Review last May entitled “The mismatched ambitions of two oil men”.

The article profiled Anzon Australia executive chairman Steve Koroknay and Nexus Energy managing director Ian Tchacos and their respective companies as well as the takeover battle then raging between the two companies.