On 22 November 2019, DTU hosted the meeting of the Copenhagen section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), organized by the Danish Hydrocarbon Research and Technology Centre, (DHRTC, DTU) and Center for Energy Resources Engineering (CERE, DTU).
Participation of the DTU SPE Student Chapter (the Chairman Ph.D. Student Hadise Baghooee) resulted in the presence of many DTU students at the meeting.
This year the meeting was especially well attended. In total, around 100 participants from academia and from the industry were registered. The Society of Petroleum Engineers is a worldwide organization accounting for several hundred thousand members.
It is active worldwide, organizing several ten conferences and workshops every month and publishing several engineering research journals, with a collection of SPE papers amounting to almost two hundred thousand.
The Copenhagen SPE section involves representatives of all the most important petroleum companies operating in Denmark. At the DTU it has created an active Student Chapter, at present amounting to ca. 8 members. Collaboration between the Student Chapter and the “adult” SPE makes it possible to establish regular contacts between the students and the professionals, which is very important for the students’ professional development and, eventually, for their future employment.
The SPE Copenhagen section, among other activities, organizes monthly SPE meetings. These meetings are being organized by the petroleum companies, at different places around Copenhagen. Once a year such a meeting is traditionally hosted by the DTU. This is the way for the DTU researchers to present their recent results to the industry.
The meeting traditionally started with refreshments, informal get-together, and the poster session. The posters from the Ph.D. and M.Sc. students in the area of petroleum engineering were presented.
The main part of the meeting consisted of the two presentations. The DHRTC was represented by its Director Morten Jeppesen, who presented his view towards the future design of Danish oil and gas production, and participation of the Centre in it. The second talk of the day was given by Professor John Bagterp Jørgensen (CERE, DTU Compute), who talked about perspectives in digitalization and optimization of the upstream oil and gas industry.
The presentations were followed by dinner, during which the representative of the DHRTC, Researcher Ali Eftekhari, presented an entertaining talk about the balance between sustainable and traditional sources of energy in Denmark: How much can in principle be covered by sustainables, and what environmental perspectives can be.