Rosa Maria Aguilar Sánchez-Dehesa, reservoir geologist at Repsol and one of the expert jury members during the FIELD Challenge presentations in Madrid, explains the competition.
his year’s FIELD Challenge dataset is being provided by Repsol, an integrated oil and gas company based in Spain. We have exploration and production projects on every continent, with one of the world’s fastest-growing portfolios in terms of production and refining assets, among the most efficient in Europe. For the FIELD Challenge students received a dataset with real data from two neighbouring development fields. It includes subsurface and facilities information (raw data, interpretations and reports). Real data means that the information may not always be ‘perfect’ and ‘fit for purpose’. The finalists will have to QC, analyze, classify and sometimes edit some of the data received and make it useful for their pur-
poses. This data-mining method, together with the decision-making process, should ideally be carried out by an integrated team of geoscientists and engineers. The challenge is to inject new ideas to extend the producing life of these two fields and maximize the potential recovery factor. We hope the FIELD Challenge provides students with the opportunity to face a real oil industry problem, dealing with realistic information that is very often limited and needs a QC check before using it. During the early years of education at different universities and research centres, the case studies available were generally simplified. However, the real world is somewhat dif-
ferent because the problems are more complex, as a result of the combination of multiple factors as well as the data quality and availability. The FIELD Challenge comes at the right time and it surely complements a student’s education, preparing them for the world to come. At the start of a professional career, it is not expected that a newcomer will immediately solve complex problems. However the new recruit’s willingness to bring a fresh and open perspective to problems is something that companies value. They also look for those able to acknowledge their limitations due to a lack of experience but are not afraid to ask questions. It is through asking those questions that you learn!
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SPECIAL www.eage.org/rs • page 51
HOW THE REPSOL DATA SET WILL CHALLENGE THE TEAMS