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40th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology – Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Decoding the shift: Organics and Critical Minerals in Future Energy ABSTRACTS DUE: 1 July 2024 It has been four decades since the first official TSOP meeting at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia (USA) in 1984. Although the aspiration was always for TSOP to be an internationally recognized professional organization, I think few of us could have imagined […]

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UNDERSTANDING COAL – New Book Out

It is no secret that the mere mention of the word coal is divisive. Yet, people on either side of the debate have a far from adequate understanding of what coal actually is. Practically no one who is talking about coal these days has the faintest idea of the conditions under which it is formed, […]

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100% Pure New Zealand … Critical Minerals!

As a New Zealand Citizen, I am always amazed at the grandeur of its landscape. Although I have lived outside New Zealand for the last 10 yrs, I can never forget just what a wonderful place it is.  Thus, when there was an opportunity to head back both for work and pleasure, how could I […]

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A Critical Mineral Conundrum

As the world’s population passes the 8 billion mark there is little doubt the strain that puts on the Earth’s resources†. Just think on that for a moment. Clean, potable water is at a premium. Unprocessed food stuffs are not available to a large part of the population. And energy to power washing machines, schools, […]

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Workshops of Reasonable Decisions

Like in many other places in the world, the country of Mongolia is endeavoring to move away from coal.  And it is trying to be both practical and realistic.  There are not many people in Mongolia, just 3.3 million for an area that stretches to 1.56 million square kilometers. People are spread pretty thinly over […]

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Out of Time

How the newly published paper “Constraints from lamprophyre petrogenesis on the timing of Eocene lithospheric thinning and associated rifting of Borneo and Sulawesi” (Murphy et al., 2024) came to be has an interesting history. Well, to me anyway.  If we take the Way Back Machine* to the mid-1980s, when I was doing my PhD field […]

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A Look Back and A Look Forward

I returned the other week from an extremely enjoyable trip to Patras, Greece where the 39th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP) was held. The meeting occurred in tandem with the the 74th Annual Meeting of the International Committed on Coal and Organic Petrology (ICCP).  A big shout out to the organisers […]

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Book Out Soon! – 2nd Edition of Coal and Coalbed Gas

The 2nd edition of “Coal and Coalbed Gas: Future Directions and Opportunities” is in production and should be out in September of 2023 – this year!  As many of you know the first edition was published in 2014 by Dr Romeo Flores and the second edition is authored by Romeo again as well as Tim […]

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Wildfires in the Cretaceous!

Wildfires are in the news lately, but if you were in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia during the Early Cretaceous (~100 million years ago) you’d find yourself in a lot of smoke! Even though it was tough times for vegetation, the palaeomires were able to accumulate incredible thicknesses of peat – enough to make 70 […]

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Carbon Accumulation and Loss in the Cretaceous

On the 7th of June, 9pm Brisbane, Australia time I’ll be giving an invited lecture on some of the palaeoclimate, palaeovegetation and palaeotectonic studies we’ve been doing in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. This is for The Society for Organic Petrology. Read the abstract for the talk below. It’s ONLINE and Open to All! […]

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