Ashley Francis - Instructor Biography

Instructor Biography

Ashley Francis

Ashley is a geophysicist and geostatistician whose career has encompassed over 30 years world-wide oil industry experience of exploration, development and production geophysics. He has also consulted to the nuclear and engineering sectors on subsurface description and uncertainty. Since 1993 he has specialised in geostatistics in addition to geophysics. Ashley has worked in or on behalf of service companies, consultancies and oil companies in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Far East and Australia. He spent 5 years with LASMO plc in Technical Services assisting and advising asset teams worldwide in geophysics (particularly inversion), geostatistics, risk and uncertainty. After leaving LASMO in 2001, Ashley co-founded Earthworks with Julie Francis. Earthworks is a consultancy specialising in subsurface geoscience, based in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. His innovative ideas have been developed both in services and in new and ultra-fast stochastic seismic inversion software at Earthworks. He lectured in Borehole Geophysics to Honours Graduates at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa 1989-90 and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Post Graduate Institute in Sedimentology, University of Reading, UK 1995-97. He continues to lecture geostatistics to MSc Petroleum Geoscience students at Imperial College, London, a role he began in 1999. His current industry geostatistical and advanced property modelling course has been running successfully since 1996 and the newer seismic inversion course since 2000. Both courses are also run as part of the Geoscience Training Alliance (GTA) consortium in London and in Houston and are widely acclaimed by participants. In 2011 GTA commissioned Ashley to present a brand new course for industry on stochastic depth conversion and volumetric uncertainty, a course that is also proving to be very popular. Ashley has presented regularly at EAGE conferences and workshops and was author of the "Understanding Stochastic Inversion" tutorial series in First Break.  Ashley is a committee member and regular attendee at the SEG Development and Production Forum and chaired the 2000 and 2003 D&P Forum conferences.  He was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2006 - 2007, presenting worldwide to reservoir engineers on the benefits and pitfalls of seismic inversion data in reservoir modelling. In 2011 the EAGE presented him with the Anstey Award for his “very substantial, original and diverse contribution to seismic inversion and geostatistics, and to the quantifying of uncertainty and risk.” Ashley is a member of SEG, EAGE, IAMG, BSSS, IPSS and PESGB.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.