Malcolm Rider joined the hydrocarbon industry during the
heady, early days of North Sea exploration. His early career was with Total,
at first in the UK and then in France, where his job as an internal company
consultant took him around the world. After a little more than 10 years he
left Total to establish Rider-French Consulting Ltd. based in Cambridge,
England. The company, with a small number of dedicated employees, enjoyed
success in geophysical and geological consulting and in specialist log
interpretation. It was during this period that the first edition of the very
successful, ‘Geological Interpretation of Well Logs’ was written.The log interpretation book led naturally to requests for training courses. These gained in importance when BP established a geological logs course as part of their company induction training programme. On the basis of this success, Rider-French began offering high quality courses in a range of subjects, both in-house and publicly. The company moved from Cambridge six years ago and ceased large scale consulting.
Malcolm Rider now shares his time between personal consulting, presenting logging courses and working with PhD students at Edinburgh University, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. A second, updated edition of the Geological Interpretation of Well Logs was published in 1996 with many new chapters covering, for example modern image logs, and logs in sequence stratigraphy. The book has become very popular and is now a standard text for graduates in many universities but at the same time is much used by the industry in many countries. Courses based on the book are also popular and are presented to the industry world wide.
Malcolm is married with three, grown up sons. He lives in the beautiful far north, Highlands of Scotland – for most of the time.