We are well under way in planning the AAPG 2016 Annual Convention and Exhibition, which is being held June 19-22 in Calgary, Canada. While the number of participants and exhibitors are expected to be down from last year – reflecting the state of our industry – it has been encouraging to see that the number of papers submitted remains high.

Next year will be a special ACE: We will be celebrating AAPG’s 100th anniversary, and a lot of special events are being planned for this.

In our Region we have remained busy:

• A very successful Geoscience Technology Workshop was held in Bangkok in April, titled “Characterisation of Asian Hydrocarbon Reservoirs.” We had over 100 attendees and feedback has been excellent. Many thanks go out to Chevron and PTTEP, which strongly supported this first AAPG event in Thailand, and to AAPG Region vice president Chris Oglesby, who was on the ground to help put this together. (We are not planning any more GTWs this year. Instead, planning is well on the way for a better year in 2017 with GTWs planned in Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia.)
• We also have established a committee to organise the third Myanmar oil and gas conference, to be held in conjunction with EAGE and the Myanmar Geosciences Society, in Yangon from 22-24 February 2017.
• AAPG Distinguished Lecturer Dave Cantrell visited the Region in February and provided lectures to enthusiastic audiences in Japan, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia.
• The International Barrel Award competition (IBA) took place in April, and the winner for our Region was the team from Institut Teknologi Bandung (Indonesia), whom the judges selected after hearing submissions from 15 other universities in the Region. The quality of presentations was once again very high, and now the winner will visit Calgary to compete against other regional winners in an attempt to once again bring one of the top prizes back to the Asia Pacific Region.

We would like to thank all those who participated and judged this competition.

We are still in trying times for our industry – and while there is pressure on our budgets, we do not intend to reduce our services to our members. We are working on ways to assist those members who have lost their jobs, but who need to keep their geological and networking skills up to date.

I would encourage you to take a look at our website to see what is happening.

Peter Grant
President, AAPG Asia Pacific Region