Colorado School of Mines team advances to Imperial Barrel Award finals

The Colorado School of Mines placed third in the 2012 and 2014 competitions.
The Colorado School of Mines placed third in the 2012 and 2014 competitions.

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.