Petroleum engineering students from around the nation can now connect with others in the discipline and possibly win $2,000 for their research.
The Petroleum Engineering Challenge, offered by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), will help students collaborate on ways to produce Alaska’s heavy oil.
The contestants are charged with creating an internally coherent engineering solution or technical proposal to solve the problem of producing heavy oil from a reservoir with determined properties. One of the primary challenges is that the engineering solution must preserve the integrity of the permafrost layer.
The challenge is coordinated by Obadare Awoleke, assistant professor of petroleum engineering at UAF, as part of a project within the Chancellor’s Innovation in Technology and eLearning (CITE) program. It’s the first time the challenge has been offered.
“I want to promote inter-university collaboration among petroleum engineering students,” Awoleke says. “The technology is there for students to look beyond the university walls and share knowledge.”
Looking outside their own university is important because petroleum engineering is still a specialized degree — fewer than 25 U.S. universities offer the major. Students in the program learn the significance of drilling, production, reservoir engineering and evaluation throughout their engineering courses. Extraction of hydrocarbons remains a complex problem, so it's important students learn to partner with one another and develop skills and expertise that will be useful in different geographic areas.
The online community
“Sometimes you might want to share your ideas out there with your peers,” says Awoleke.
To that end, UAF has created an online Google+ community where students can share research ideas and post questions.
Owen Guthrie, an instructional designer at UAF, helps faculty design online learning experiences. He says the contest will be a launching point for the online community, which now has more than 100 members.
“The main goal is to get [the online community] to become a national — if not international — resource for petroleum engineering students,” says Guthrie.
Guthrie says the main goal of the contest, which will award one team a minimum of $2,000, is to drive traffic to the website.
“We hope to not only create a collaborative community experience for the duration of this project, but also create sufficient momentum in our Google+ Petroleum Engineering Research community so it begins to take on a life of its own and has lasting value for students and researchers alike,” Guthrie says.
Applicant teams must consist of undergraduate or graduate engineering students enrolled in a U.S. college/university, and teams must have two to five students from multiple colleges or universities to qualify. Proposals must be peer reviewed and submitted by Dec.1. Winners will be announced on Dec. 12.
For more specific details, visit cem.uaf.edu/petroleumchallenge.
