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A campus competition determined which of our students will represent the department in the SPE Gulf
Coast Regional Student Paper/Presentation Contest. The Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering competition was
held on October 26th. Winners of the top two prizes in these contests will go on to compete at the regional level of competition,
to be held here on April 12 of 2008. The winning presenter at the PhD level is Abraham K. John with, “Productivity
Improvement in Fractured Gas Condensate Wells.” In second place is Elena Rodriguez, with her paper “Model for the Straining
of Fines in Unconsolidated Sands.” The third place prize goes to Okhtay Taghizadeh who presented a paper entitled “
Sweep efficiency for solvent injection into heavy oil reservoirs at grain scale (Displacement of Extremely Viscous Fluid).”
Placing first in the MS division competition is Waleed Fazelipour who presented “Development of a Fully Implicit,
Equation-of-State Compositional, Parallel Simulator to Model Asphaltene Precipitation in Petroleum Reservoirs.” Pradeep
Ananth Govind, is in second place for his paper “Evaluation of the performance of an ES SAGD process.” In third place is
Javad Behseresht, who presented his work “Infinite-Acting Physically Representative Networks for Capillarity-Controlled
Displacements.”
In Undergraduate competition Viet Quoc Le, ranks first with his entry, “CO2 Foam in Enhanced Recovery.” In second place is
Eric M. Looney who presented “Redeveloping a Mature West Texas Oil Field.” Placing third is Ryan Taylor, with “Waterflood
Conformance Through the Use of Polymer.” Congratulations to all of the students who participated, and particularly to the
nine winners.
Prize money was awarded at all three levels of competition; each first place winner won $500, each second place winner won
$300 and each third place winner won $200. In the event that first or second place winners are unable to attend the next
level of competition, the third place winner will act as alternate, and will go on to compete again. The SPE Paper Contests
are held to encourage students to present research or application projects. This not only provides for exchange of
information, but equally important, it gives the student an opportunity to improve communication skills.
Each year the regional sections of the student chapters of SPE hold paper/presentation contests. The requirements state that
the paper should be the original work of the author in planning the investigation, performing the work, interpreting the
results and preparing the presentation/paper. The subject of the paper must be related to petroleum engineering which is
defined as the application of basic and engineering sciences to the finding, development, and recovery of oil, gas and other
resources from wells.
The first place winners from each of the eight regional contests then advance to compete in an international contest to be
held at the 2008 Annual Fall Meeting. We wish our students good luck in the next round of the competition!
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