[ Winners of the Sinergia 2018 competion: (left to right) Diana Ramos, Miguel Sanchez, and Juan Barrero.]
Sinergia (the Spanish term for “synergy”) is a technology innovation academic challenge developed by the SPE Colombia Section and supported and sponsored by Halliburton. The objective of the program is for final year students and recent graduates to show their hard and soft skills to the oil and gas industry community by proposing an innovative solution to an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) challenge using technology and programming skills.
The Sinergia 2018 competition was advertised on the section’s social media platforms and had a launch as part of Halliburton’s Landmark Innovation Forum & Expo in Colombia, which was transmitted via streaming to the target audience. Eighty-three teams applied to Sinergia2018 but only ten spots were available. Each team comprised three people with skills in teamwork, programming, oil and gas knowledge, and proficiency in English. Participants were from the engineering fields such as petroleum, chemical, mechanical, systems, electrical, electronics, and geology.
The Competition
Five EOR challenges were proposed for the competition. Each team received one of them and had 2 months to come up with an innovative solution to it. During the development of the program, participants had to attend live webinars of training sessions in soft skills, technical knowledge, and use of the iEnergyCloud platform provided by Halliburton. More than 20 hours of training were delivered to the participants. An SPE technical committee evaluated the solutions proposed and selected the three best teams for the Grand Final. SPE Colombia Section members volunteered to create the challenges, organize the training sessions, and the evaluate the proposed solutions.
The Winners
The Grand Final round of the competition was held in Medellin Colombia as part of the SPE Technical Conference, an event organized by the student chapters in Colombia. The finalists presented their solutions in front of an audience of approximately 300 people and the three Halliburton judges. All the teams showed great research skills, implementing artificial intelligence and programming skills, and the Holistic Engineers team with members Diana Ramos, Juan Barrero, and Miguel Sanchez were announced the winners. They created a software that optimizes parameters for cyclic steam injection. The winners were invited to join the Halliburton DEEP Program, obtaining their first working experience. Currently they are hired by Halliburton and working in Colombia.
Preparations are going on for the Sinergia 2019 edition, and we expect this program to expand to other countries for creating more opportunities for SPE young professionals. We intend to become a showcase for participants, so people in the industry can see their talents.
For more information, visit the SPE Colombia web page at www.spe.org.co.
[The article was sourced by TWA editor Nii Nunoo.]