SPE’s third-largest section continues to reinvent itself. Chaired by Laura Weeden of Canwhite Sands, the section prides itself on following the SPE International mission and vision. The section boasts 11 special interest groups (SIGs) overseen by Silviu Livescu of Baker Hughes and run by approximately 40 dedicated volunteers who organize weekly technical events. In addition, the section organizes many nontechnical events, such as ski trips and golf tournaments, that provide its members additional networking and relationship-building opportunities.
The SPE Calgary Young Professional team has developed a strong energy literacy program over the past few years. This is the third year that a Family Science Day, the flagship energy literacy event, is being organized and co-hosted by the SPE Student Chapter from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. More than 200 people are expected to attend an event that will provide them with five hands-on experiments, a tour of a rig simulator, the opportunity to talk to professors and students, and see real drill bits, wellheads, and much more.
Another promising initiative is a new take-home science kit with everything needed to complete the “Fracking with Jell-O” Energy4me experiment. The section’s goal is to engage every energy company in Calgary to sponsor or purchase kits for their employees and to provide them to local schools at no cost. More than 400 kits have been sold as of February 2020, with more requested regularly.
As part of a nonprofit technical society, the SPE Calgary Section shares many of the challenges faced by the other SPE sections around world, such as remaining relevant during the commodity cycle while ensuring the sustainability of operations. Financial well-being is an important barometer for the overall health of the section, and significant time, effort, and technology investments have been made during the 2019–2020 Board year toward an internal data makeover for improving the reporting transparency and financial literacy. This initiative has been led by Kent Qin of Husky Energy.
Before 2019, the SPE Calgary Section welcomed 2,500–3,000 registrants yearly to more than 40 technical and networking events. These numbers presented a significant challenge for a volunteer-run organization in keeping track of unique customers, vendors, sales, and expenses, across several functional portfolios using spreadsheet-based work flows. This led Qin to search for a more-suitable tool for accounting and to take the leap to cloud-based accounting using QuickBooks Online.
One of the most active SIGs is the Data Science and Engineering Analytics (DSEA) group. This is the interface with the SPE Digital Energy Technical Section (DETS), the SPE Petroleum Data Driven Analytics (PD2A) Technical Section, and the online DSEA Community on SPE Connect. The DSEA SIG Committee, chaired by Danial Kaviani of Suncor Energy, believes that greater general understanding and specialist knowledge are required to advance the use and development of data analytics in the industry. To date, the DSEA SIG has hosted multiple events including luncheons that have been focused on case studies from industry and academia. Other events, such as a breakfast series, explored the fundamentals of data analytics, with speakers from industry and academia covering topics from visualization to machine learning as well as the application of edge devices in the upstream oil and gas industry. Two standout events new to the SPE Calgary Section were 10-session evening series focused on Python fundamentals and machine learning for petroleum engineering and geoscientists.
Perhaps the most-unique event organized by the DSEA SIG will be a Datathon, co-hosted with Untapped Energy, a local nonprofit association with a focus on data science for oil and gas. The concept of the Datathon is simple: the organizers will provide a data set, and the participants will provide insights. What is the value in the data? What corporate or societal problems can be solved with this data? What can the data relate to create new insights? The outcomes may include visualizations, insights into specific variables, and predictions or analyses involving external data sets. Currently, the DSEA SIG Committee members are working on selecting a proper data set that is of interest for section members as well as for the data scientists from other industries in Calgary. The participants will have a certain time frame to work on the provided data and submit their results for the pitch night.