Meet the Architects of the Energy Future

Oil & Natural Gas / Conventional Oil & Gas Resources

Edith Newton Wilson, 2019-2020 President of the Energy Minerals Division (AAPG) opines that Buckminster Fuller, the American designer, inventor and visionary said, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” In the Commodity Committees of Energy Minerals Division of the AAPG, we hear that calling and embrace it. In our 2019-20 fiscal year, we welcome the return of longtime leaders as well as an influx of new ones to our design team. Ursula Hammes and Tom Temples have joined our executive group as president-elect and vice president, and we have new faces as chairs and councilors as well.

Three Mikes
For me, it’s a tale of three Mikes.

First, we are fortunate to have the experienced mentorship of Michael D. Campbell, who chairs our Uranium Committee. “MDC” was a founding member of EMD in 1977 and has worked since its inception in almost every role, including president. Today, he pushes us to appreciate the history of the organization (and Part 2), and [honor its tradition and original objectives that involved keeping AAPG members up-to-date on other forms of energy beyond those of traditional oil and gas]. But he also steps forward without fear to [look forward to off-world resources, while warning to confront media bias against developing our natural resources and in addressing the challenges of climate change (more) as we find new uses for oil and natural gas as feedstocks, other than for just burning, like coal (more). Coal may have important contributions after all, other than for burning (more) and so could oil and gas (more).]

Then there’s Mike Bingle-Davis, one of our newest councilors for the Rocky Mountain Section. He jumped in with both feet, taking to heart our guidance that the role of councilors is to inject EMD content into section meetings. The RMS meeting in September featured a special EMD session that included talks on helium, lithium stripping, mining and CO₂ sequestration. Mike even stepped in at the last minute to replace a missing speaker with a talk on the rise of blockchain in our industry.

Finally, Miguel Nicho-Pacheco is helping our executive team identify candidates for leadership from the growing Latin America and Caribbean Region.

Renewal
There’s a lot of renewal activity in the Division. The EMD Facebook page is building a following as timely information gets posted, and our new LinkedIn group is growing. Search and Discovery now has a Special Collections tab for EMD’s annual technical reports. We’ve restructured our committees, placing those without a current market on hold, while combining Tight Gas Sands and Shale Oil and Gas to form a new Unconventional Tight Oil and Gas Committee. This merger, spearheaded by past EMD President Wayne Camp and President-elect Ursula Hammes, is designed to focus the committee’s efforts on leading-edge research and fourth industrial age applications.

We’ve had almost an order of magnitude more abstract submissions for EMD-sponsored themes for the ACE 2020 to be held in Houston than we had papers presented in San Antonio last May. And Lorena Moscardelli and Milovan Fustic are ready to pick up the torch for program planning in the coming years. As co-chairs of our Annual Meeting ACE/ICE Committee, they will work with the new central planning platform and GeVO. Along with new leaders and a new committee structure come changes in our reporting practices that allow greater flexibility to present information in a variety of formats and publications, as well as the traditional written summaries posted to the web.

At EMD, we welcome new ideas. Like architects, we envision a world we can’t see, we build coalitions between clients, and we tell stories to engineers to engage them in testing and developing our geologic models. We see a future in which we can apply our reservoir modeling skills to the art of creating digital twins and turn from spreadsheet updates to blockchain management. Join us in the Energy Minerals Division of the AAPG, where our geoscientists are the subsurface architects of the energy economy.

Article copy w/o links: https://i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/WilsonEMD2019C.pdf