STEM In The Pipeline – Victory for Inverurie Academy
Following three months hard work 10 school teams from across Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire met at BP on Friday to present their oil and gas industry projects to a panel of experts. Team Urie Dynamics from Inverurie Academy was awarded top place for their ‘STEM in the Pipeline’ project with the Aboyne Academy team, Team Inertia in second place and Dyce Academy, Team Dyce Diggers in third place. Team ‘Click Me’ from Mackie Academy was awarded the George Buckenham Trophy for Innovation. All the pupils were congratulated for their good project management and technical strength, particularly impressing the judges with their optimisation work on well numbers.
The project was designed with industry professionals by charitable organisation TechFest-SetPoint. It is supported by BP, Chevron and ConcocoPhillips to show pupils how their school knowledge of physics, maths, chemistry and geology can be applied to an industry problem. The school teams were asked to investigate the seismic charts of the STEM field and calculate the amount of oil in place, produce a production profile for the field and calculate all costs and CO2 emissions over the life of the field. Finally they had to design a separator to separate the produced oil, water and gas.
Throughout the project the teams worked at school, with the assistance of industry professionals. The pupils were able to realise some of the career opportunities available to them in the oil and gas sector and develop valuable skills useful for university life.
Sir Robert Smith, MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, presented the prizes
said “I would like to congratulate all the teams and in particular the Inverurie Academy pupils who clearly worked hard as a team and deserved the recognition of the judges. This competition is a great opportunity to promote the practical use of the Maths they have learnt and should help them in their future careers.”
Vivien Ellins, organiser from TechFest-SetPoint said ‘The panel of assessors were most impressed by the high standard of work from all the teams and had a very difficult job to choose the winners. Congratulations to all the teams who completed STEM in the Pipeline, and also to their teachers whose work over the last six years has enabled the students to realise their abilities.’
Marcia Houghton, value creation manager at Chevron Upstream Europe, said, ‘Helping students to engage in this kind of activity is another way the company can promote the industry and support its communities. Many of these students have relatives and family friends who are employed in the energy industry so it really helps them to better understand how they work and what they do. We look forward to some of them becoming Chevron employees of the future!'.
12th Dec 2007
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