B.Sc. Honours (University of Manitoba)

Neil grew up on a farm at Gladstone, Manitoba and started university at Brandon. He transferred to the University of Manitoba and attended it from 1972-1976, graduated with a BSc (honours). He worked between university years prospecting and doing geological field work in northern Manitoba, the the North West Territories west of the Mackenzie River, and in the high Arctic on Axel Heiberg, Ellesmere and Cornwall Islands.

On graduation in 1976, he commenced working for Mobil Oil Canada as a wellsite geologist on wells in northwest Alberta and northeast BC. He expanded his knowledge and comfort base by shifting to wellsite geology work on jackup rigs near Sable Island, and semi-submersibles off Newfoundland.

Other geological assignments with Mobil included production geologist, intern petrophysicist, heavy oil geologist, and team lead – with an overseas assignment in Irian Jaya leading a geological field mapping project. In 1992 he shifted permanently to petrophysics, handling exploration wells in western Canada and has stayed in that discipline since then.

In 1997 he moved to St John’s, Newfoundland – on secondment to the Hibernia project. In 2000 he briefly integrated into ExxonMobil in western Canada, providing petrophysical analysis on the Parsons Lake field development project before his return to the Hibernia project in Newfoundland.

Neil joined Husky Energy in St John’s in 2002, handling field and operational petrophysics on the White rose project, transferring to Husky’s offices in Calgary in 2005 to provide operational petrophysical analysis on wells being drilled in the Canadian north, and offshore China.

Neil left Husky and Calgary in 2007, shifting gears to start his own consulting company (Atlantic Petrophysics Limited), based in Halifax. Since that time he has provided petrophysical analysis to companies working Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and providing logging supervision and petrophysics to Statoil and Husky Energy working off of Newfoundland.

During this final stage of his career in geology and petrophysics, he is gradually reducing his petrophysical contracting commitments - while finding satisfaction in helping a new generation of aspiring geologists at Dalhousie University learn practical petrophysical skills.