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Home 9 Training 9 SCA Instructors 9 W. Lansing Taylor, PhD

For the past seventeen years, Dr. W. Lansing Taylor has been an accomplished structural geologist with extensive industry and field experience specializing in Structural Geology, Fractured Reservoirs, Geomechanics and Field Geology.  Dr. Taylor joined SCA as an instructor in 2008.  His Structural Styles in Petroleum E&P short course and the accompanying Structural & Sequence Stratigraphy Field Course (Hill Country, TX) are consistently rated at the top of the scale among our students.  His development and EOR experience includes Hugoton, Golden Trend, Permian Basin, Ozona, and the Austin Chalk, while his exploration experience includes Alaska, North Africa, Middle East, and SE Asia.

Dr. Taylor is currently working as a Sr. Structural Geologist with Talisman Energy and previously performed both technical and management roles with Anadarko Petroleum. His most recent experience with Talisman includes structural evaluation, providing in-house training, implementing new technology, interfacing with academic research and structural consortia, petroleum system analysis, and risk assessment from basin to wellbore scale. While at Anadarko he worked as a project advisor and fractured reservoir specialist aiding exploration and development teams in solving issues related to structural geology.

His accomplishments include three discovery wells on the Gulf Coast, one in Alaska, and a new basin entry for Anadarko in Indonesia.  Following the merger with Kerr McGee, he managed the evaluation of their mid-continent and west Texas fields, and made all G&G presentations for the subsequent divestiture of assets (proceeds ~$2 Billion).

Dr. Taylor received his B.A. in mathematics and geology at Skidmore College, receiving department honors of Suma Cum Laude.  He received his Ph.D. in Quantitative Structural Geology, “Fluid flow and chemical alteration in fractured sandstone”, Department of Geological and Environment Sciences from Stanford University.