Janja - testimonial

You can see that a Master's in Earth, Life and Climate comes in handy.

I always hesitated between being a Biologist or a Geologist so when I heard about the Master's Biogeology (now called Earth, Life and Climate) I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. As part of my Master's I did a 6 month assessed internship in Shell. The aim of my project was to investigate the detailed paleoenvironmental aspects and variability of Cenomanian/ Turonian (100.5-89.8Ma) source rocks and to identify possible ways to predict the distribution and quality. To reach this goal I used Gross Depositional Environment maps which I rotated back to their correct plate configuration, allowing contextual evaluation e.g. depositional facies belts, paleolatitude etc. To get an impression if the indicated source areas were correct I did a literature study and imported source rock property data from several databases. To complement my findings I also looked at several paleoclimate models, plotted the data on the maps and interpreted the trends.

The presence and variability of source rocks is a key element in conventional and unconventional petroleum systems which are of great importance to the Oil Industry. As source rocks consist of organic rich sediments containing a mix of microfossils and are deposited in a variety of environments related to climate variability you can see that a Master's in Earth, Life and Climate comes in handy. I finished my master 2013 and currently work for Shell as an Exploration Geoscientist in the New Play Development team. For the last year I worked on Biogenic Gas which as the name already implies is again related to Biogeology. Next I intend to further develop wider exploration skills like seismic interpretation.