By tradition the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Azerbaijan Section held its 6th Annual Students Symposium, this time ever bigger and with a lot more intensive agenda. The 2 days Symposium was dedicated to the Petroleum Technology with aim to raise the students’ awareness and share the knowledge of the application and the value of the technology throughout the field’s life-cycle. We were proud to conduct this event as an officially registered organization first time in the history of SPE Azerbaijan with direct involvement and financial support of international petroleum companies and State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic.
PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM started with competitive selection of 40 students amongst 150 applicants from several universities of Azerbaijan including Azerbaijan State Oil Academy, Khazar University, Baku State University, Moscow State University (Baku branch), and Qafqaz University. We have selected some of the most proactive, brightest, and sociable boys and girls from various technical backgrounds such as applied mathematics, petroleum engineering, geoscience, chemistry, pipeline engineering, and so on…
DAY 1 of the symposium started with the welcome speech of the chairman of SPE Azerbaijan Section, Ali Naghiyev followed by motivational talk by the General Manager of Schlumberger Azerbaijan, Will Grace, who shared his career path in the industry and his experience with E&P Technology with participants at Crescent Beach Hotel. Later, student groups visited Schlumberger base and West Chirag Platform at Atayard. At Schlumberger students were shown and presented with drilling, completion, surveillance, and logging technologies, iiiwhereas at Atayard they had a rare chance to walk on the new West Chirag Platform. Operations team at Atayard has kindly toured the groups of students through drilling and production quarters with technical briefing on operational facilities such as separators, production manifolds, pumps, drilling rig etc. After a very hard, but informative day the students enjoyed dinner with SPE Azerbaijan Section Board members sharing their impressions from the visits. At the end of the day, everybody headed to 28th May Railway Station to take the iiiovernight train to Ganja city.
DAY 2 Upon arrival at Ganja Railway Station, a bus was arranged to take the group to Chinar Hotel in Naftalan. Following the breakfast students visited Naftalan field where they were explained the principles of land seismic acquisition by SOCAR specialists. Apart from the description of the field and ongoing seismic operations SOCAR representatives from the Exploration Geophysics department showed and described the practical aspects of the land seismic data acquisition in general and demonstrated their recording and primary seismic data processing facilities at work with use of the new 3D vibro-seismic technology. Moreover, students had the luxury to see and feel the ground vibrations created by vibro-machines by witnessing the real-time seismic operations near Naftalan field area.
Team Project in Chinar Hotel was the closing circuit of the practical awareness that the students received during 2 days of field trips. After the detailed presentation on basics of seismic acquisition and interpretation by BP Baku Geophysics Discipline Lead, Hasan Asgarov, the group was split into 5 teams and tasked to solve the exercise of developing a field with application of petroleum technologies.
During the exercise students had to use their understanding of exploration, appraisal and production technologies, display creativity, efficiently distribute the tasks among the team members and provide a practical solution within the allocated timeframe. As the final product the students built a physical reservoir model and associated facilities using real seismic cross-sections, meccanos, kits and other materials. At the end, each team was assessed based on the presentation of their solutions and results. The winning team was identified and presented with SPE souvenirs, and all participants were given the certificates upon the completion of the symposium.
The Symposium Winner was chosen based on the final quiz on Petroleum Technology and overall performance during the event. Narmin Mehraliyeva, 4th year student from Applied Mathematics department of Baku State University won the prize to attend International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC) 2013 in Beijing, China.
OUR SPONSORS AND ORGANIZERS,We would like to thank SOCAR, BP, Schlumberger, Halliburton, Total, and Statoil for making it all happen, and turning this symposium into a big success. We truly believe that the students were impressed by the immense scale and variety of E&P technology shown to them during the 2 days symposium. This would hopefully contribute to their professional development in the near future and encourage the students to pursue a career in the petroleum industry.
Our special and cordial thanks go to organizers of the Petroleum Technology Symposium 2012:
SPE Azerbaijan Technology Transfer Officer, Javid Babayev (BP)
SPE Azerbaijan Officer and Board Member, Agamammad Sultanov (SOCAR)
SPE Azerbaijan Program Committee Person, Ilkam Mukhametshin (Schlumberger)
SPE Azerbaijan Student Chapter Liaison, Aysel Kazimova (BP)
Drilling Startup Engineer (Chirag Oil Project) at ATA Yard, Richard Hildick-smith (BP)
We would also like to express our deep gratitude to BP AGT Vice-President of Exploration & Appraisal, Greg Riley, Head SOCAR Exploration Geophysics Department, Dr. Namaz Yusubov, and BP Chirag Oil Project Rig Build Lead, Kevin Walter