Rocky Mountain Section

January and early February are going to be busy months for AAPG’s Distinguished Lecture program, with several speakers set to make tours.

Three speakers from the AAPG-AAPG Foundation’s Global Distinguished Lecture Program will be on tour in November, making stops in the western parts of North America and throughout the Asia-Pacific Region.

Team registrations are now being accepted for this year’s AAPG-AAPG Foundation’s Imperial Barrel Award program (IBA), an annual prospective basin evaluation competition for geoscience graduate students from universities around the world.

In many environmental areas, it seems the energy industry is often on the defensive and is forced to react to real or perceived environmental issues rather than employ forethought to anticipate the majority of issues that might arise from energy-related activities.

As AAPG Division of Professional Affairs president I am often asked, “What is the DPA’s purpose?” I decided one of the best ways to answer this question is take the Letterman approach with a Top 10 list of purposes and reasons to be part of DPA.

The idea of using lasers for drilling into the earth has long been to the oil and gas industry what flying cars and hoverboards are to the general public – the stuff of science fiction and futuristic fantasy. As 2015 fast approaches (contrary to what we were promised in the “Back to the Future” movies) we haven’t quite cracked the code yet on flying cars and hoverboards, but there might be a consolation prize in the works: Laser drilling may actually become a reality.

AAPG is committed to connecting promising original research with much-needed funding and is continually seeking – and finding – new ways to make that potential a reality.

MOOSE – Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment – is a software platform designed to make predictive modeling and simulation faster and easier.

Unconventional plays are producing hundreds of wells within relatively small spaces, and all are cranking out more data than any human could possibly track. It’s a fact that has driven the oil and gas industry to search for technology that can intelligently quantify such data and increase the odds of a discovery.

It has a new name, a new energy and a new lineup of experts, all primed to spread geoscience knowledge around the world. “It” is AAPG’s newly named Global Distinguished Lecture Program – emphasis on the “global” – which dates back to 1941 but continues to be the Association’s flagship initiative for offering the latest in geologic science to AAPG affiliated geological societies and universities.