David Baxendale, SPE, passed away on 29 June at the age of 70. His career included more than 40 years’ reservoir engineering experience in the oil and gas industry, specializing in reservoir simulation, field development planning and management, resource assessment, and reservoir surveillance.
Throughout his career, he worked for various multinational and small independent operating companies including BritOil Ltd. (BNOC), Petro‑Canada Resources, Norsk Hydro Oil and Gas, Sabah Shell Petroleum Company Ltd., Santa Fe Energy Resources (Jakarta) (later acquired by Devon Energy), ExxonMobil Oil Indonesia Inc., Unocal Indonesia Company, Gaffney, Cline and Associates Pte. Ltd. (Singapore), and RPS Energy Ltd. (Singapore branch). In 2016, he formed his own company, Equinox International Petroleum Consultants Pte. Ltd., where he served as founder and managing director until his death.
He was one of three founders of OPM-OP and assisted with writing the OPM Flow User Manual and OPMRUN, the graphical interface to OPM Flow, an open-source reservoir simulator for three-phase flow.
From 1996 to 2009, he was an adjunct professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, department of petroleum geosciences. From 2010 to 2018, he was an adjunct professor at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, department of geology, faculty of science, teaching the petroleum engineering module for the MSc geoscience course.
An SPE member since 1979, he served as an officer for the Sarawak Section (1995–1996) and Java Indonesia Section (1996–1997). He also served as a program chairperson for the Sarawak Section (1992–1995). At the time of his death, he was a member of the Singapore Section, where he’d been an active member since 2005.
In 2020, he received the SPE Regional Reservoir Description and Dynamics Award. He authored the paper, Application of Reservoir Management and Reservoir Simulation To Monitor and Improve the Performance of the M4/7/N1 Reservoirs in the Samarang Field, Offshore Sabah, East Malaysia, in 1995.
He holds a Higher National Diploma in mathematics, statistics, and computing from Liverpool Polytechnic, a diploma in mathematics from Leicester Polytechnic, and an MSc in operational research from University of Strathclyde.