Institut Teknologi Bandung wins IBA Asia Pacific Region Semi-Finals

Five members of the winning team and their supervisors from the Institut Teknologi Bandung (Indonesia) will be travelling to the AAPG’s Annual Convention and Exhibition (ACE) held in Calgary this year, as the winners of the Asia Pacific Region’s IBA Semi-Finals. The team presented their technical assessment of the petroleum potential of the Bristol Bay Basin to an independent panel of judges made up of petroleum industry experts from across the Asia Pacific Region.

This year a record number of IBA Teams took part in the Asia Pacific competition, which is held annually and hosted online using the web-based video conferencing software WebEx. A total of 15 teams from the region, including Bangladesh, Australia, Indonesia, China, India and Malaysia presented their findings in a 25min presentation, after having 8 weeks to interpret their datasets. In evaluating their datasets, the teams define the petroleum system elements which make up their key plays, from which they can identify their leads, before undertaking a risk analysis for each of their prospects. A final step is the recommendation that the team puts forward for future exploration activity based on prevailing technical and economic conditions.

All of the 15 teams within the Asia Pacific Region presented very high-quality technical assessments of their datasets. It was a difficult decision for the judges to select the ultimate winner, with the scores being very tight. After much deliberation, the Institut Teknologi Bandung (pictured) were declared the winners, with two schools, Curtin University in Perth and China University of Petroleum in East China awarded with Honourable Mentions for their excellent work.

The Asia Pacific Coordinators Adrienne Pereira (AAPG), Hock-Kim Ong (Shell) and Jonathan Conti (Beach Energy) would like to congratulate all of the teams on their outstanding efforts in this year’s competition. The Coordinators would also like to express our sincere thanks to our 4 fantastic judges Sudhakar Vijapurapu (Shell Bangalore), Hans Dols (Sabah Shell), Huang Xiu (RIPED, PetroChina) and Paulus Tangke Allo (Statoil Indonesia); who volunteered their time and effort in evaluating the presentations, and providing feedback to each of the teams.

Sadly, this year represents the last year that Asia Pacific Coordinator & IBA Committee Member Kim Ong is able to be the region coordinator for the competition. On behalf of the AAPG IBA Competition, we’d like to sincerely thank Kim for his hard work, commitment and dedication over the last seven years.