Charles Thomas was seduced by the magic of Africa on a visit to Angola in a gap year following his geoscience studies. He has retained the connection more or less his entire career, first with Halliburton, then EMGS and briefly Searcher Seismic mainly in business development. Now a UK-based entrepreneur, he works on various upstream projects in Angola and Namibia with frequent visits to the continent he loves.
Family background
I’m a Shropshire lad. My parents and extended family left school at the earliest opportunity. University wasn’t part of my plan. I left school with one decent grade GCSE – in maths until after I passed my retakes in 1988. By some miracle I took geology from the humble GCSE to master’s. It was the only science subject that I really understood, having grown-up under the shadow of Wenlock Edge.
My A-level Geography teacher was a proud Scouser. She took us on a day trip to Liverpool to visit the docks and Toxteth and arranged a lecture on urban renewal at the top floor of the Roxby Building at Liverpool Uni. It seemed like an excellent city, so I managed to find a way in.
Light bulb moment
‘Introduction to sequence stratigraphy’ by the late Prof Trevor Elliott in my second year – deltaic sedimentology, cyclotherms, transgressive systems tracts, etc. – totally hooked me! Imperial College London came next, where I remember writing up my research thesis on the original Mac that I’d ‘appropriated’ from the Geology department for the weekend. It got published in EAGE’s very own Petroleum Geoscience!
Angola first time
I took a gap year in Angola during a civil war. I lived with the parents of an Angolan friend who’d been at Imperial with me. It was an eye-opening experience for a 23-year-old unemployed expat. I ‘volunteered’ with Texaco (Tako Koning!) to witness a well and spent three weeks offshore Block 2. I ended up getting paid and mud-logged for a year offshore Congo and Angola on Girassol-2 helping to box up some core – beautiful sandstone turbidites.
Halliburton years
After a few years back in the UK as a contractor for BG in Reading UK, I returned to Angola with Landmark Graphics. Everything changed. I fell in love with Africa and the business development side of geophysics – on the road throughout Africa with a Linux laptop and two passports. Lower Congo golden triangle blocks were being developed and the world was watching. I caught malaria, was highjacked. at gunpoint, and also met my future wife! Unbeknownst to me, a Statoil-led group of researchers was acquiring a proof-of-concept resistivity marine survey over Girassol and Dalia. The results gave birth to marine CSEM services. After a few more years in Cape Town and Cairo with Halliburton, I joined EMGS in 2008 as their ‘man in Africa’.
Offshore EM
EMGS had just made the transition from 2D to 3D CSEM capabilities and now had an inversion product that could be co-rendered with seismic. It was cutting edge tech that I believed in, but it wasn’t so easy to convince exploration managers of the value proposition. ‘Stop exploring, start finding’ was an early marketing mantra that with hindsight was an own goal. Team EMGS remain a great group of optimists who through time and a lot of effort have grown the toolbox into a robust, repeatable, non-seismic method.
Covid turning point
Covid hit EMGS hard. We were two days from survey start-up in West Africa with a major customer, testing the new Deep-Blue source. Then out of nowhere the whole world shut down. EMGS went into immediate hibernation and I was unemployed for the first time in my career. I read Jeopardy by Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, which motivated me to set-up Striped-Horse in Angola with Dilo Sa, a geophysicist friend and now business partner.
Entrepreneurial life
Striped-Horse has delivered two significant upstream multi-client projects in Angola to date with industry partners and we’ve created a National Well Cuttings Laboratory in Luanda, the second largest database of its kind in the world. More recently we have begun a full basin eFTG airborne survey over the Onshore Kwanza basin. I have also recently joined QXI as a founder shareholder. It’s a start-up E&P company focused on Namibia. Namibia has excellent potential and the new team has several former Galp executives who all want to find the next Mopane.
Time off
Trail running in the Shropshire Hills with friends. My two boys and I also play hockey for Bridgnorth. It’s a great way to stay fit, but can be brutal playing in the middle of January in the UK. I miss Africa!
