Towards the Next Breakthrough in Technology
The GEO technical committee co-chairs Ahmed Fateh and Anwar Al Beaiji discuss what new advances in geoscience and technology are on the horizon that will unlock inaccessible or overlooked potential, and how GEO will assess the impact in 2020 and beyond.
Ever since its inauguration in 1994, the GEO exhibition and conference has firmly established itself as a prime venue for petroleum geosciences where it brings together major NOCs, IOCs, academia, service providers and manufacturers. It provides a dedicated collaborative platform for professionals and subject-matter experts to share knowledge, discuss ideas and exchange experiences on various challenges, techniques and advances in geosciences.
Preparing Geoscientists for the Future
The upcoming GEO in 2021 has a rich technical programme that covers a wide spectrum of geosciences and their applications in the petroleum industry, starting from advances in data acquisition, interpretation and integration to value creation. It is exciting to see how the different geoscience disciplines are particularly evolving with the rapid changes happening across the energy landscape; and how machine learning and artificial intelligence combined with great amount of subsurface data will play a vital role in preparing our industry and professionals in oil and gas for the next breakthrough.
Focus on Industry Challenges & Advances
What are the challenges of the future and how will they be overcome? What new advances in geoscience and technology are on the horizon that will help in unlocking previously inaccessible or overlooked potential? What will be the impact on the years beyond 2020? With the conference revolving around the theme of geosciences in the digital world, these are some of the questions that GEO aims to address through the interaction between the local knowledge and the international experience.
The 4th Industrial Revolution
The technical programme has been designed to present and stimulate discussions on advances in geoscience workflows, developments in geological and geophysical data acquisitions, best practices and efficiencies, unique case studies, big data and data analytics, multidisciplinary concepts, and the applications of geosciences to hydrology, environment and mining sectors. The technical programme, in line with the theme of the conference, has a particular emphasis on the utility and relevance of the fourth industrial revolution in shaping our approach to managing, interpreting and integrating the vast amounts of legacy and new subsurface data, our methodology of acquiring data, how we evaluate different play concepts, how we conduct operations and consequently how it will impact the petroleum business as a whole in the future.
Special Sessions & Field Trips
In addition to the technical papers, GEO is offering special technical sessions and a number of exciting geological field trips to different areas across the region to study outcrops of importance to different exploration and development projects. There is also a dynamic students and young professional programme aimed at introducing and inspiring students to the petroleum industry.
GEO is a venue to learn from the latest industrial advancements and capture new opportunities for better value creation. It is indeed an outlook towards the future on how we embrace and adapt to the changes around us in terms of science and technology, economy and profitability, environment and social responsibilities.
About the Authors
Anwar Al Beaiji
Saudi Aramco
Anwar currently works as Business Development Specialist & Subsurface Lead at the International Gas, Petroleum Engineering & Development, Saudi Aramco. With 16 years of multidisciplinary experience in hydrocarbon resources, reserves evaluation and energy economics, he has worked on various multi-billion USD projects in Saudi Arabia. Anwar earned his BSc in Geosciences from Tulsa University, MSc in Petroleum Geosciences from Imperial College London and Masters in Energy Economics from Rice University, Houston, Texas.
Ahmed Fateh
Tatweer Petroleum
Ahmed works as an Exploration Geologist with Tatweer Petroleum where his responsibilities include resource assessment and play evaluations along with planning and execution of exploration drilling, testing and data acquisition projects in Bahrain. He has been working on the Jurassic unconventionals, Devonian tight gas and conventional offshore oil and gas exploration. He graduated from the University of Durham with a Bachelors (hon.) in geology.
