 |
On December 6, Co-PIs William Ambrose and Ursula Hammes accepted the JSG Outstanding Research Program Award on behalf of the STARR team from Dean Sharon Mosher. The Bureau's STARR (State of Texas Advanced Oil and Gas Resource Recovery) project is a unique alliance between academe, government, and industry designed to improve energy resource recovery while increasing State education funding through enhanced tax revenues. In the 2008 - 2010 biennium, |
| STARR researchers published 45 peer- and non-peer-reviewed articles and received six Excellence in Geoscience awards, including the Wallace E. Pratt best paper award, published in the world's premier petroleum geology journal, the AAPG Bulletin. In the same period, the team generated total severance tax revenues for the State of Texas in the amount of $16,568,217. In addition to Ambrose and Hammes, STARR team members at the Bureau include Tucker Hentz, Maryam Mousavi, Jeff Sprowl, Hongliu Zeng, Gregory Frebourg, Chris Ogiesoba, Bob Loucks, Seay Nance, Scott Hamlin, Bruce Cutright, Laura Zahm, Qilong Fu, Tongwei Zhang, and Robert Baumgardner. |
 |
Susan Hovorka, Eric Potter, and Hongliu Zeng enjoyed a very busy visit to Beijing, meeting with several organizations to discuss research and possible collaboration in carbon sequestration and energy resources. Sue spoke with groups at the China University of Geosciences, RIPED (the research arm of PetroChina), China University of Petroleum (CUP), Peking University, and BGP (geophysical unit in PetroChina). Hongliu and Eric addressed groups at BGP, RIPED, and CUP, describing BEG's research consortia and discussing unconventional gas plays in the US, and a deep carbonate karst play in western China. |
 |
On November 18 and 19, a record 325 delegates from 35 companies attended the Applied Geodynamics Laboratory's 23rd annual Industrial Associates Review Meeting. The meeting included 20 presentations on regional salt tectonics, small-scale salt structures, stresses and overpressures around salt, allochthonous salt tectonics, and AGL technology transfer. Presentations by AGL scientists Mike Braunscheidel, Tim Dooley, Mike Hudec, Martin Jackson, Gang Luo, Angie McDonnell, Maria Nikolinakou, and Ian Norton were joined by guest lectures from Nexen employee (and AGL alumnus) Bryce Wagner and Hess's Robin Pilcher. |
 |
On November 8, the Houston Geological Society presented Graduate Research Assistant Dolores van der Kolk its award for The University of Texas at Austin’s Outstanding Geoscience Student. Presented annually, the award includes a $500 cash prize and biographical feature in the HGS Bulletin. Van der Kolk is currently conducting research for advisor Lesli Wood and the Quantitative Clastics Laboratory (QCL) industrial associates program at the Bureau. |
| Van der Kolk and HGS President John Tubb |
|
