A team from the Colorado School of Mines recently won the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) competition for the Rocky Mountain section, which allows them to advance to the international Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) competition.
"This is the most successful industry supported student project in AAPG that impacts hundreds of students internationally," Petroleum Engineering Professor Steve Sonnenberg, the team’s faculty adviser, said. "Students love the competition. They meet industry mentors, land jobs on the spot if they do well and learn new computer software by analyzing a data set. Industry loves the competition because they get to see students giving technical presentations on very complex data sets."
The IBA competition is open to geoscience
graduate students at universities across the globe, and allows them to put
their education to use, evaluating real data with state of the art technology.
Before the competition, the teams will receive datasets including geology,
geophysics, land and production infrastructure, among other factors. They will
then evaluate the data and present their results to a panel of judges from the
industry, who will determine a winner based on technical quality, clarity and
originality.
The Colorado School of Mines, which placed
third in the 2012 and 2014 competitions, will be joined by the
winning universities from the other 11 AAPG sections.