Buckminster Fuller, the American designer, inventor and visionary said, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” In the Energy Minerals Division of the AAPG, we hear that calling and embrace it. In our 2019-20 fiscal year, we welcome the return of longtime leaders as well as an influx of new ones to our design team. Ursula Hammes and Tom Temples have joined our executive group as president-elect and vice president, and we have new faces as chairs and councilors as well.
Three Mikes
For me, it’s a tale of three Mikes.
First, we are fortunate to have the experienced mentorship of Michael Campbell, who chairs our Uranium Committee. “MDC” is a founding member of EMD and has worked since its inception in almost every role, including president. Today, he pushes us to appreciate the history of the organization and honor its norms. But he also steps forward without fear to address the challenges of climate change.
Then there’s Mike Bingle-Davis, one of our newest councilors for the Rocky Mountain Section. He jumped in with both feet, taking to heart our guidance that the role of councilors is to inject EMD content into section meetings. The RMS meeting in September featured a special EMD session that included talks on helium, lithium stripping, mining and CO2 sequestration. Mike even stepped in at the last minute to replace a missing speaker with a talk on the rise of blockchain in our industry.
Finally, Miguel Nicho-Pacheco is helping our executive team identify candidates for leadership from the growing Latin America and Caribbean Region.
Renewal
There’s a lot of renewal activity in the Division. Our Facebook page is building a following as timely information gets posted, and our new LinkedIn group is growing. Search and Discovery now has a Special Collections tab for EMD’s annual technical reports. We’ve restructured our committees, placing those without a current market on hold, while combining Tight Gas Sands and Shale Oil and Gas to form a new Unconventional Tight Oil and Gas Committee. This merger, spearheaded by past EMD President Wayne Camp and President-elect Ursula Hammes, is designed to focus the committee’s efforts on bleeding edge research and fourth industrial age applications. We’ve had almost an order of magnitude more abstract submissions for EMD-sponsored themes for ACE 2020 than we had papers presented in San Antonio last May. And Lorena Moscardelli and Milovan Fustic are ready to pick up the torch for program planning in the coming years. As co-chairs of our Annual Meeting ACE/ICE Committee, they will work with the new central planning platform and GeVO. Along with new leaders and a new committee structure come changes in our reporting practices that allow greater flexibility to present information in a variety of formats and publications, as well as the traditional written summaries posted to the web.
At EMD, we welcome new ideas. Like architects, we envision a world we can’t see, we build coalitions between clients, and we tell stories to engineers to engage them in testing and building our models. We see a future in which we can apply our reservoir modeling skills to the art of creating digital twins and turn from spreadsheet updates to blockchain management. Join us in the Energy Minerals Division of the AAPG, where our geoscientists are the subsurface architects of the energy economy.