Apache Names Bedingfield Head of Unit in Australia

By Angela Macdonald-Smith

April 3 (Bloomberg) -- Apache Corp., the company at the center of a gas plant explosion last year that crippled mining in Australia’s largest state, named a new vice president for regional operations based in Perth.

John Bedingfield, who has been deputy managing director and exploration manager at the Houston-based company’s Australian unit, will replace Tim Wall, Apache said in an April 2 statement. Wall will become the president of Apache in Canada.

Wall’s move to Canada is a promotion and isn’t related to the Varanus Island accident, Bill Mintz, an Apache spokesman in Houston, said by telephone. Wall replaces John Crum, who has joined the office of the chief executive officer, he said.

A June explosion at Apache’s Varanus Island plant cut 30 percent of gas supplies to Western Australia, causing fuel shortages in the resource-rich state that generates a third of the country’s exports. A national safety watchdog blamed the company’s “ineffective” protection of a gas pipeline against corrosion and inadequate inspection for the blast. Apache said the findings were “premature and misleading.”

Apache, operator of Varanus Island and of the Legendre and Stag oil fields off Australia’s northwest coast, is due to boost production in the country this quarter with the start-up of the Van Gogh oil field. It is also developing the Pyrenees venture with BHP Billiton Ltd., due to start production in early 2010, and the Reindeer gas project with Santos Ltd.

Bedingfield joined Apache in Houston in 1998 as senior staff geophysicist and spent six years in Cairo as geophysical manager and later was promoted to exploration manager, according to the statement. He became deputy managing director of Perth-based Apache Energy Ltd. in August 2005.

Wall began his career at the company in 1990 as an engineer in Houston and moved to Perth as deputy managing director and operations manager in 2005. Positions held by him at Apache include country manager for China and manager for North Sea operations.

To contact the reporter on this story: Angela Macdonald-Smith in Sydney at amacdonaldsm@bloomberg.net