Europe Region Activities Growing

The London-based AAPG European Region office has had a busy year – we moved to new premises in the heart of London last year and have had an exciting time developing our events and activities while liaising, helping and cultivating our membership and providing a welcome coffee stop for all those AAPG members passing through London.

One of our highlights was participation in the Imperial Barrel Awards.

The European Region competition took place March 26-27 in Prague, Czech Republic, and 13 teams from universities all over Europe took part in the competition, representing diverse cultures, countries and opposite sides of the continent, but all sharing one field of common interest – petroleum geology.

After a hard fought and incredibly busy two days of competition under the watchful eyes of judges from CGG Veritas, ExxonMobil, Nexen, Shell, Statoil and Sterling Resources, the IFP School from Paris, France, emerged victorious.

Two weeks later they attended the IBA finals competition at the AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition in New Orleans, competing against teams from the United States, Canada, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Africa and Latin America.

We were again ecstatic when the team from IFP won the overall competition. It was a fantastic effort from the French university, and we offer our congratulations on this outstanding achievement.

Just prior to the Imperial Barrel Awards competition was APPEX, AAPG’s upstream asset fair and conference held in London at the beginning of March. This was a great success that attracted over 550 delegates and 63 exhibitions.

Many exhibitors and delegates considered it the best ever APPEX event. Under the watchful chairmanship of Mike Lakin, a phenomenal number of presentations were packed into three days of networking and deal making.

The 2011 event will run again at the beginning of March, combining with three short courses.

The European Region also runs a lot of activities on the educational and networking front, including:

• The monthly Oil Finders Lunch in Aberdeen, Scotland.
• The summer “Education Week” in Scotland.
• A Student Chapter leadership meeting in the Czech Republic.
• An international geoscience student conference in Romania.
• Distinguished Lecture tours, short courses, a joint GTW (with the Middle East office) held in Turkey and a collaboration conference at PETEX in London.
• In the next couple of months we have two more short courses in Paris, on Rift Basin Geology and Basin Modeling; a GTW in London on reserves classification; and a GTW in Copenhagen on the regional geology of West Greenland.

Finally, we’ll have a very busy month of March, with APPEX, three short courses, a President’s lunch, the Imperial Barrel Awards (we’re currently fielding a huge number of inquiries about participation in the 2011 competition) and a Student Chapter meeting.

That’s enough to keep us all busy.

Membership seems to be growing steadily in Europe, and we are working hard to encourage the upgrading of memberships to Active status.

We have 25 active Student Chapters in the Region, which are expected to grow under the stewardship of Nick Lagrilliere.

We would not be where we are today with having such an excellent and active European Region Committee. ER President Dave Cook has been exemplary in his role – his enthusiasm, foresight and knowledge of the industry has helped enormously with the task of developing a plan for the year.

The support from incoming European Region president Vlasta Dvorakova, Knut Jakobsson, Bert Clever, Istvan Berczi and Jean Gerard – to name but five members of the committee – also has been instrumental in forging our program.

Last but not least, John Brooks – the Peter Pan of Europe – has been an invaluable and ever-present help to me, never slow to offer advice when needed and with an ability to put many situations and opportunities into perspective.

I personally thank you all.