Mike Allison
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Mike Allison
I was born in Durham, North Carolina. My dad graduated with his Medical Degree from Duke University. As a kid, we lived in Germany (2 years) and South Florida. I grew up enjoying everything involving the ocean and outdoors. We did a lot of camping all over the US and Canada and scuba diving (scuba) in the Bahamas and other islands in the Caribbean. In the mid-60s, my Dad taught us kids (4) how to scuba in our pool. I was only 11 years old when I started. I was wall diving to 150-200 feet only a few years later. While getting my Undergraduate Degree in Geology at the University of Miami, I did some cave diving in several of the Florida Springs. While living in Australia (nearly 5 years), I did quite a lot of scuba diving off Western Australian and the Great Barrier Reef. One of my most memorable adventures was swimming with the Whale Sharks in Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia.
Mary and I spent 2 wonderful years in Knoxville while attending the University of Tennessee. I received a great education and made some lifelong friends there. Our oldest son, David, was born at Fort Sanders Hospital. I studied under Dr. Kula Misra. My M.S. Thesis was entitled, “Trace Element Distribution in Pyrite and Pyrrhotite From the Ducktown Mining District, Tennessee”. My Committee included Dr. Hap McSween, Dr. Otto Kopp and Dr. Larry Taylor. A fun fact. I wanted to avoid using the mainframe computer so I purchased a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer and Dot Matrix Printer. The monitor was a Black & White TV (9” or 13”?) and storage was on cassette tapes. Not much technical software available at the time so I wrote a data processing application in Basic. I taught Mary how to use the word processing software I bought for the computer. Most of the data processing, graphing and word processing was done on this system. My final submitted thesis was retyped by Mary on an IBM Selectric typewriter.
I spent 34 years in the upstream oil & gas industry in both Geoscience and Information Technology (IT). Much of my experience was focused on leading IT teams directly supporting key Exploration & Production (E&P) departments including Geosciences, Engineering, Spatial/GIS, Land and SCADA. I worked for different Oil & Gas (O&G) companies including Majors (Gulf Oil and Chevron/WAPET), Independents (Devon Energy and Fieldwood Energy) and several Service Companies (Exploration Logging, Landmark Graphics, Geoscience Data Management and Moblize).
After leaving Fieldwood Energy, I founded a drone services company named Raptor Aerial Services LLC (RAS). The company provides aerial mapping surveys, stockpile volumetric calculations, inspections, data collection and marketing to a variety of industries.
I am an active member of AAPG, HGS and SPE. I have severed as the Treasurer-Elect and Treasurer on the HGS Board. As a member of the HGS Continuing Education Committee, I conceived and initiated the recording of HGS presentations now available at https://www.hgs.org/multimedia_overview. I have taught a couple of HGS Continuing Education Courses entitled, “Introduction to Drones (UAVs) for Surveying in the Energy Business” and “Introduction to UAV (Drones) Aerial Surveys and Other Applications”. I have made over a dozen presentations on the use of drones to various industry groups and educational institutions. I have been married for 40 years to my wonderful wife, Mary. We met in Salt Lake City, UT and lived in 6 States (UT, WA, TN, LA, TX and CA) and 2 Countries (USA and Australia). We have 4 sons, David, Christian, Matthew, and Jonathan. They all earned their college degrees (LSU, Texas A&M, University of Houston, and University of Dallas). Our sons are all married and have 9 children (our grandchildren) between them. My hobbies include camping, hiking, travel, photography, and spending time with our family.
Contact
Email: mike@raptoraerialservices.com
Professional Website: linkedin.com/in/mikecallison
Research Interests
Economic Geology, Upstream E&P IT Management, Drone Services
Education
M.S. 1984 Geological Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville