Conferences and Seminars
The 2009 AAPG Imperial Barrel Award Competition and European Student Chapter Leadership Meeting
The 2009 European AAPG Imperial Barrel Award competition was held at the Albion Hotel in Prague on 27th and 28th March. Eleven university teams participated in the event: Kiev, Ukraine; Southampton, UK; Miskolc, Hungary; Warsaw, Poland; Lomonosov Moscow State, Russia; Barcelona, Spain; Potsdam, Germany; Tyumen, Russia; Institute Francaise du Petrole, France; Eotvos Lorande, Hungary and Imperial College, UK. The competition took place over a period of one and a half days and was judged by industry representatives from Total, StatoilHydro, ExxonMobil, Nexen and Shell. The winning team from Moscow State University represented Europe in the final at the Annual Convention in Denver in June and also won the global competition. Second and third places in the regional event were awarded to Imperial College and Southampton University respectively. The judges considered that the evaluations of the data and the presentations were of very high quality and congratulated the teams on their effort and commitment.
Running in parallel with the competition was a European Student Chapter Leadership Meeting. Representatives from the following universities took part: Institute Francaise du Petrole, France; Kiev, Ukraine; Ivano-Frankovks, Ukraine; Aberdeen, UK; Edinburgh, UK; Imperial College, UK; Leoben, Austria; Bucharest, Romania; Babes-Bolyai, Romania; Delft, Netherlands; Lisbon, Portugal and Vrjie Amsterdam, Netherlands. The meeting was lead by Nick Lagrilliere, Chairman of the AAPG European Students and Young Professionals Committee and gave the participants the opportunity of reviewing activities and discussing issues with respect to maintaining the active status of chapters. Mike Mlynek, AAPG’s manager of student activities, reviewed the products, services and support that the Association can provide the Chapters. The meeting was considered to be a great success and will hopefully benefit the active chapters and promote the reactivation of dormant chapters. After the meeting was finished the student chapter leaders were given the opportunity to attend the IBA presentations which we hope will encourage more universities to take part next year.
The European event was sponsored by Shell, ExxonMobil, Nexen, Total, StatoilHydro, Sterling, CGG-Veritas, MOL and Hess. Some of the sponsors set up booths in the Exhibition Hall in order to display information about careers for the students taking part in the competition and the leadership meeting.
On the final evening a gala dinner was held in a medieval hall on Kampa island in the River Vltava that runs through the centre of Prague. The whole event was considered to be a great success and an invaluable opportunity for networking between students, academic staff, industry representatives and AAPG officers and staff. It is hoped to run the competition in Prague again next year with an increased number of university teams. We thank our sponsors for their contributions, without which we would not be able to hold what we believe is an important event in the AAPG calendar.
Sixty-five teams participated in the regional IBA competitions and ten teams entered the final in Denver, these were Obafemi Awolowo, Ile-Ife, Nigeria; Khon Kaen, Thailand; Memorial, St. John’s, Canada; Lomonosov Moscow State, Russia; South Carolina, Colombia, USA; Texas A&M, College Station, USA; Nebraska-Lincoln, USA; Texas at El Paso, USA; Colorado, Boulder, USA; San Diego State, California, USA. We congratulate the team from Moscow State University for winning the competition this year against very strong competition. Second and third places went to University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Memorial University respectively.
All teams taking part in the regional and global events are to be congratulated for their hard work and enthusiasm which resulted in high quality presentations. Finally our thanks go to our sponsors without whom we would not be able to hold these events. We believe that the IBA allows the sponsoring companies to build relationships with a large variety of universities around the world and evaluate the quality of the programmes and students, which is invaluable for recruiting a new generation of geoscientists into our industry.
David R. Cook
President Elect
AAPG European Chapter