Tissa Jayasekera Awarded OBE in Queens's Birthday Honours

Tissa Jayasekera has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's 2003 Birthday Honours List for his work as Head of the DTI Licensing and Exploration Directorate's SHARP (Sustained Hydrocarbon Additional Recovery) Programme. This eNewsletter is one of the initiatives under the programme. Tissa and his family have a date to attend an Investiture at Buckingham Palace in December 2003.

Tissa expressed his surprise but delight on receiving the honour. Tissa joined the DTI in 1990, initially working as a Senior Reservoir Engineer in the field teams, but moving to head up the SHARP programme in 1998. Tissa had also worked in the field teams when they were part of the Department of Energy during 1981-83.

From 1983 to 1990 Tissa was a Senior Reservoir Engineer with ARCO British Ltd working on the Southern North Sea Gas Basin and on HPHT fields in the Central North Sea . He ran the first UKCS HPHT extended well test in the field that is now known as Puffin.

Tissa was born in Sri Lanka and received a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ceylon in 1966. He went on to obtain a master's degree in the same subject from the University of Birmingham in the UK. During the mid-1970s Tissa worked for the Nuclear Power Company (NPC) at Risley, but the opportunity to move into the oil industry came in 1979 when he joined the Research Institute of the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was here that Tissa became one of the early pioneers using reservoir simulators (at that time BETA-2 from Intercomp) to model and optimise reservoir depletion strategies in Saudi fields. He also took the opportunities available in the learning environment of the University to extend his knowledge of the oil industry.

Tissa's fame has spread in his native Sri Lanka and during a recent holiday there he was invited to address the Institution of Engineers of Sri Lanka. His account is presented below.

Presentation to the Institution of Engineers of Sri Lanka

After returning from the IEA EOR event in Regina I had the good fortune to be able to spend a three week vacation in sunny Sri Lanka. The Institution of Engineers of Sri Lanka (IESL), in which several of my colleagues from undergraduate days are active members, extended me an invitation to give a talk at their meeting held on 30 September 2003. I was asked to pick my subject but make sure I explain how my work led to the award of an OBE. The title of my talk was "An Overview of the UK Oil Industry".

Tissa Makes His Presentation to the IESL - Mr Priyal De Silva, the Incoming President of IESL, is Chairing the Meeting

This went down quite well, particularly because there is a resurgence of interest in offshore exploration in Sri Lanka, after a lapse of about 20 years. The main impetus is the success achieved on the Indian side of the Cauvery Basin, which straddles India and the north of Sri Lanka, where fields are in production and a significant discovery has been made close to the median line. Dr Robert Shaw reports the ongoing work on the Sri Lankan side in his article in the Offshore Engineer (May 2002). A licensing round is expected to be announced shortly.

Sri Lanka Exploration Map Showing the Cauvery Basin

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