Peter has had a 50-year career as an exploration geologist in the oil and gas sector after graduating in geology from Southampton University in 1965. He first emigrated to Canada and worked for Mobil before transferring to Libya in 1969. After a 3-year break to do a PhD at U.C.L, he returned to Mobil in Indonesia until 1974. He then worked for Premier Oil in London for 2 years before spending the next 20 years co-founding and serving as a director of several oil industry exploration geoscience consultancies and working on projects worldwide. These consultancies included Dolan & Associates Ltd, IKODA, JEBCO and Ikon Science.

In the mid-1990s he was a co-founder and Chairman of Fusion Oil & Gas, which explored off West Africa and was listed on AIM in 2000. When that was taken over, he and others founded Ophir Energy in 2004 which built a portfolio of deepwater acreage offshore Africa, making very significant gas discoveries.

In 2015, Peter was declared Africa Oil Legend 2015, at the annual Africa Upstream Conference in Cape Town in recognition of his contributions to UK and general E&P activity in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last 20 years.

Peter has numerous other oil business interests including being an advisor to both Impact Oil & Gas and AIM-listed investment company Reabold Resources plc. He is also an investor in numerous early-stage private companies, both within and outside the E&P business.

Peter founded the Geological Society’s ‘City of London Geoscience Forum’, and has been a member and Chairman of numerous committees within the Geological Society over the last 30 years. In 2018 he was awarded the Society’s William Smith Medal which recognises the application of geology in commercial settings. He is actively involved with several other professional bodies, as well as local community and charity activities.