Celebrating a Renewed and Engaged DPA

Sometime in the turn of the century, someone forgot to mention to you that the next step of AAPG membership is becoming certified. That is when you reach the apex of AAPG membership. Certification has been one of AAPG’s main purposes as a means of differentiating between the lay geologist and the professional geologist. It is a form of recognition both within our industry and outside in the general public to confirm that you are what you say you are, providing credibility to your resume. If you find yourself in your mid-career, holding degrees in geology or geophysics, and have not yet been certified, now is the time. Becoming certified provides you membership in the Division of Professional Affairs, a means of extending your networking reach, and access to the industry elite, and that added truth behind your resume.

An invitation has been sent recently to most of you whom we believe are very likely qualified to become certified. Application is easy, just go to www.aapg.org/divisions/dpa/join, and the application fee is currently waived, so apply now.

I became certified in my mid-career, after 20 years with Amoco, and it was no doubt a great value to me and to those who hired me, to those financing me and to my peers and partners as I ventured forth outside of the protection of a major oil company for another fruitful 25 years.

Certification grants membership to the DPA, but we already offer a higher level of certification, called Board Certification, which has more stringent criteria and annual maintenance and qualifies you to provide petroleum reserves estimates. If our proposed DPA Bylaw revisions are approved, the DPA will provide for several additional certification programs. The first is to provide for the certification as a Subject Matter Expert in the following disciplines:

• Resource and reserve evaluation and reporting
• Conventional resource evaluation
• Unconventional resource evaluation
• Well planning, well Operations and HSE
• Environmental geosciences
• Geomodeling, geostatistics, data analytics and AI

The second new program will be Global Certification, which we are developing to meet the highest of international standards. Those already Board Certified will be grandfathered to Global Certification. Get yourself Board certified before the grandfather window closes.

‘Renew and Engage’ Successfully Completed

This is my last EXPLORER column as DPA president, thus I must declare that the two-year “Renew and Engage” initiative is successfully nearing its completion. Almost all the goals I have set for myself and the DPA have been met and, in fact, most have exceeded our targets. The DPA is now back to pre-pandemic condition, and I think it is now better than it was before. We have found a way to manage the business of the DPA much more efficiently, with less use of volunteer time. We are also running our meetings as businesses do – by email and via requests for approval of recommendations, rather than by the very much outdated “board room”-style, which nobody with a practical business to run would ever think of relying on to get the job done. As of mid-March, we have held 14 meetings this term to consider nearly 90 decisions, so we have found the means do more with less and still to remain in compliance with the existing Bylaws, but there is still more which can be done by revising the Bylaws.