Nicholas Boutakoff and Australia's North West Shelf

Purcell, Peter¹; Collins, Yolande; and Collins, Mike
¹[email protected]

The North West Shelf (NWS) of Australia is one of the world’s premier hydrocarbon provinces. The man who first recognized that potential and guided Woodside there was born Nicholai Alexandrovich Butokova in New York in 1903. His father was executed in Russia in 1917 and the family fled to France, where he completed his schooling. Boutakoff, as he became known, attended the University of Louvain in Belgium, earning a DSc in 1929. Thereafter he spent six years mapping in the mountains of Kivu in East Africa and preparing several large volumes for publication.

He joined Kern Trinidad Oilfields in Trinidad in 1937, rising to Chief Geologist in 1944. In 1948, he joined the Victorian Geological Survey in Australia, rising to Deputy Director before his resignation in 1962.

In 1953, while visiting the Rough Range oil discovery in WA, Boutakoff sensed intuitively the potential of the NWS, located between the complex structures and oil seeps of Timor and the stable Australian continent, certain it would have prospective structures. Detailed contouring of Admiralty charts confirmed the presence of large seafloor structures and Boutakoff tried to obtain an exploration permit over the region, his efforts thwarted by a lack of applicable legislation.

In the late 1950s he began consulting to a small new Australian company called Woodside, joining them as Exploration Manager in 1962. He took with him his hand-contoured maps of the NWS and used them to outline the area of application by Woodside, who were granted the permit in May 1963, and immediately farmed it out to Shell and Burmah.

Thereafter, the relationship between Boutakoff and Woodside turned bitter, in a clash over ownership of the ideas. Boutakoff maintained he had a gentleman’s agreement for a bonus of one million shares if Woodside got the permit he recommended. Woodside’s management insisted they had directed Boutakoff to evaluate the NWS and he worked on it as their employee. Boutakoff resigned in protest but continued doggedly to pursue compensation from Woodside, especially after their major discoveries in the early 1970s.

Boutakoff died in Melbourne in 1979. His role in the discovery of the North West Shelf has been too much forgotten for many years but is now being more widely told, as here.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90166©2013 AAPG International Conference & Exhibition, Cartagena, Colombia, 8-11 September 2013