Held this morning at the conference venue, the Four Seasons Hotel, the breakfast was sponsored by Amadeus Energy and compered by Amadeus chairman Rob Scott.

The legends recognised this year were Bruce Phillips, Rod Hollingsworth and John Kopcheff.

Bruce Phillips

Australian Worldwide Exploration founding managing director Bruce Phillips leaves centre stage at the end of August, having taken AWE from start-up to a $1.3 billion company.

Phillips will leave AWE only two months after the company’s first operated project, the offshore New Zealand Tui Area oil development, begins production.

Current high oil prices mean Tui will pay out its development costs in just over two months after coming onstream.

Tui is just one of AWE’s four major projects. The company is also a partner in the Casino and BassGas projects in Bass Strait and in the Cliff Head oil project in WA.

Phillips started in the industry 30 years ago as an exploration geophysicist with US-headquartered Amax.

Since then, he has also worked for Exxon, Pancontinental Petroleum and Command Petroleum, as well as being a self-employed exploration consultant.

In 1997, Phillips was approached by some leading fund managers concerned over a lack of investment choices in Australian petroleum.

“They asked me to put together a $200 million float in upstream oil and gas and they wanted it virtually overnight,” he said.

“I said I wouldn’t get involved unless it was done properly, which meant at least two years to raise the capital and access some decent assets in the Gippsland Basin.”

He suggested an IPO to create a small company that could be grown into something much more substantial.

“They agreed and I hired some key people to build it from scratch,” he said.

“We raised $20 million in one morning in Sydney.”

Today AWE is a significant mid-cap that has helped reshape the southeast Australian gas market.

“We’ve been instrumental in increasing competition and bringing greater security of supply to the Victorian gas market with Casino and BassGas,”

Phillips said.

“We were in there trying to break the duopoly of Esso-BHP’s Gippsland Basin fields well before the other players had even thought about it.”

Phillips says he is now planning to “get a life” but is not yet ready for full retirement. He will pursue private interests in petroleum and IT.

“I’m not ready to sail out of the industry just yet,” he said in his award acceptance speech.

“I’m going to try and give back to the industry what years I have left of my life.”

Rod Hollingsworth

Veteran explorer Rod Hollingsworth emerged from retirement in 2005 with his new company Adelaide Energy to reinvent how gas is produced from the Cooper.

“One thing about retirement is that it’s fairly dull,” he said this morning.

“This industry is fun and exciting. And most of that fun comes from looking for the oil and gas.”

The company, which aims to list next month, plans to use cutting-edge technologies to access commercial quantities of gas in tight reservoirs.

“Adelaide Energy was formed especially for turning the Nappamerri Trough into, we hope, a major gas province,” he said.

“Most of the prospects we’ll be looking at are in fairly tight reservoirs, which have traditionally been very difficult to access.

“But there have been huge advances in drilling and fraccing operations in recent years, particularly in the US and Canada where they produce most of their gas from tight reservoirs.”

The company also has an onshore Otway Basin block and Colorado, USA acreage.

After founding Adelaide Energy, Hollingsworth has stepped back to become a non-executive director.

Hollingsworth graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Western Australia and joined the Bureau of Mineral Resources as a geophysicist at Macquarie Island and Mawson in Antarctica.

On returning to Australia, he became chief geophysicist of Beaver Exploration in Sydney, moving between Australia, NZ and PNG from 1970 to 1975.

While working in PNG, Hollingsworth experienced one of the scariest moments of his life. Just minutes after disembarking from a helicopter, Hollingsworth saw the chopper’s tail rotor come loose and fall off.

“I hate to think about what would have happened if that had been while we were still up in the air,” he said.

Fortunately, he was never involved in an actual helicopter accident. He made it back to Australia where he went on to join Delhi Petroleum as chief geophysicist and subsequently exploration manager for a stint he describes as the most enjoyable contract of his working life.

Then in 1999, Hollingsworth became executive director for newcomer Stuart Petroleum.

After four years of helping build this successful junior, he decided to retire.

But finding he still had a lot to offe, he soon re-entered the workforce as chairman of Canadian petroleum and investment company Fall River Resources and more recently as founder of Adelaide Energy.

John Kopcheff

For off-beat background on Australia’s petroleum industry or yarns about some of the industry’s characters, ask John Kopcheff, a well-known industry personality in his own right.

One of Australia’s most consistent wildcatters and a staunch believer in getting out and drilling wells, he was once known as “Dry Hole John” because he is said to have drilled 99 dry holes in a row.

While Kopcheff says this is apocryphal (it was only 59 wells before he made his first discovery), he wears the “Dry Hole John” T-shirt anyway.

“To be in this industry, you have to be a dedicated masochist,” he said this morning.

“But when you’re exploring and you drill a dry hole, you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and drill a new one. That’s what I love about this game.”

After a geology degree at the University of Adelaide in 1970, Kopcheff entered the petroleum industry as a mud logger with Core Lab, working in the US, North Sea, South America and South-East Asia, as well as several part of Australia.

Rising through the company ranks, he came to Perth as manager of Core Lab in the late 1970s.

Not long afterwards, he joined geological consultancy Earth Energy Resources in Perth.

Among EER’s clients was Perth entrepreneur Bob Pett, who offered Kopcheff a job with Leichhardt Exploration.

This was originally a minerals company but management decided to go into petroleum in the early 1980s and Victoria Petroleum was an ideal shell company to house the change of direction. Kopcheff, as managing director and an avowed royalist, decided to keep the name.

John and Victoria have now been together for more than 20 often turbulent and disappointing, but never dull, years.

Kopcheff broke his “dry hole” reputation a couple of years ago and has since taken VicPet to further modest successes. He is now on the verge of proving up a serious oil play in the western Cooper.