Dyce Academy Pupils Winners of SPE’s Energy Apprentice Competition

Pupils from Dyce Academy in Aberdeen, UK, have been crowned winners of ICoTA (Intervention and Coil Tubing Association) and SPE Europe’s Energy Apprentice competition, beating three other Aberdeen and shire schools to the award.

Along with Cults, Kemnay and Westhill Academies, the four schools were finalists in a competition designed to improve awareness of career opportunities within the industry and to search for creative thinkers of tomorrow. The challenge set was to come up with an idea that carries the industry into the next century, improving the extraction of North Sea Oil.

ICoTA chairman Callum Munro praised all the pupils taking part for their commitment to the challenge: “These kinds of awards really rely on those taking part to make it a success and the pupils from all the schools involved have really pushed themselves to make it just that.”

Munro also added that he hoped the award would encourage young people to pursue a career within the industry saying: “What we hoped and what I believe we have achieved with The Energy Apprentice is to highlight the opportunities within the energy sector to young people. We are in the midst of a big skills shortage in the industry so if we can get young people interested and engaged now it will ensure that the future is secure.”

The winning idea, described as the Catalyst in Well Regeneration project, could in theory allow oil companies to extract significantly more oil from existing wells and was praised by the judges for its originality and potential practicality. After demonstrating the concept with a video of their lab experiment and results the team claimed that between 75 – 95% of reserves could be extracted.

Speaking about the project, the winning team were unanimous in their view that competition was about more than winning the iPads on offer with Dyce Academy pupil, Dhruv Makwana commenting: “Winning an iPad is obviously great but honestly we didn’t know about it until we signed up to do the competition. It’s been a challenging process but really worthwhile and made us really think about the opportunities available in the energy industries.”

In addition to the individual prizes on offer the winning school was given £500 to spend on equipment.

Kemnay Academy was Highly Commended by the judging panel for their downhole ROV idea that proposes to improve access to oil in reservoirs.

All the pupils who took part were presented with a pen and certificate to mark their achievements and were also given unprecedented access to the conference exhibition giving them the opportunity to speak to some of the industries leading figures across the service sector and operators.

The competition brings a conclusion to the two-day conference that saw around 50 companies and 300 industry professionals from around the world come and share their newest technology and views on well intervention.

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Press Release, November 22, 2012