Regions & Sections
Eastern
I’ve worked for over 30 years for exploration and production companies in the Appalachian Basin. During my career, I’ve been involved in all type of plays, both conventional and unconventional. I was the geologist on a team that evaluated and drilled a successful horizontal Devonian Lower Huron Shale well in the Big Sandy Field of Eastern Kentucky in 1989. Horizontal shale drilling initially didn’t catch on in the basin. However in the last few years, the drilling of horizontal wells has been common place for both the Lower Huron and Devonian Marcellus Shale.
The Eastern Section covers a large geographic area. Our Section includes the Appalachian, Illinois and Michigan Basins and it covers 23 states, which have over 370 geoscience departments at colleges and universities.
I recently attended the Annual Leadership Conference in Tulsa. I enjoyed meeting the AAPG staff, the tour of headquarters and meeting the members from all over the world. The sessions were interesting and I gained a lot of knowledge about the various committees that run the association. During one of the breaks, I met and talked to a graduate student from an Eastern Section school. It was great to meet a new ES member who wants to be actively involved in AAPG.
The Section under my predecessor, Bob Jacobi, started working on a list of speakers that could be available to give oil and gas talks at geoscience departments. The speakers would be posted on our Web site. Greg Wrightstone, our Vice-president, has been helpful in developing this program. I plan to continue this work and I’ll encourage our members to become speakers for the program. Bob also has passed along the e-mail addresses of the 370 plus geoscience departments. I’ll form a committee that will contact geoscience departments and ask them to circulate our message to professors and students. The e-mail will introduce them to AAPG, let them know about the advantages of working in the oil and gas industry and inform them about Web sites, courses and meetings that the AAPG offers. The goal is to add new members to our Section and the association.
Beginning with our 2008 meeting in Pittsburgh, the Eastern Section initiated a voluntary program of capturing presentation slides from the oral and poster sessions along with the abstracts.We had good success in getting presenters to contribute and ended up with about 50% contribution. Our plans involve upgrading our Web capabilities to allow us to post these and future presentations on our Web site.
We held our second Imperial Barrel Award competition in Pittsburgh. There were four schools in the competition and the University of South Carolina was the winner. USC competed in the Denver meeting.We also run a student job quest at our section meeting.We had over 30 students interview at the Pittsburgh meeting and we expect about the same number of students at the Sixth Annual Student Job Quest at our Evansville meeting. Lee Avary has done a great job organizing and running both of these programs.