The fifth Middle
East Geoscience Conference and Exhibition (GEO 2002), a biennial event
that focuses on the petroleum geosciences of the Middle East basins,
will be held April 15-17 in Bahrain.
This event
is your chance to come and learn about the most prolific hydrocarbon
province of the world (65 percent oil and 35 percent gas reserves).
GEO meetings
are held in the Bahrain International Conference Centre, with rotating
general chairman from one of the six Gulf national oil companies (Saudi
Aramco in 1994, Bahrain Petroleum in 1996, Petroleum Development Oman
in 1998 and Kuwait Oil in 2000). Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is the
host for 2002, with Ali Al-Jarwan as the general chairman.
Qatar Petroleum
has been invited to chair GEO 2004.
The Program
Committee has prepared a first-class program based on the theme "From
Prospects to Mature Reservoirs," emphasizing both the exploration potential
of the region and the maturity of the supergiant fields.
The response
to the call for papers has been overwhelming, with a record of nearly
400 submitted abstracts, compared to 333 for GEO 2000.
Three days
of technical program offers five concurrent oral sessions and full day
of poster sessions. The sessions are grouped under general topics of:
- Middle East Exploration.
- Reservoir Management.
- Geology.
- Geophysics.
- Geoscience IT.
There also
will be some special sessions, plus exhibits from over 100 companies
and organizations.
(The GEO 2002
Program Committee will meet in Bahrain in early November to finalize
the conference program and prepare the final announcement. The abstracts
will be accessible on the GeoArabia
Web site)
The technical
program will be supplemented by the popular special sessions on business
issues, as well as several keynote sessions.
The first such
session follows the opening session on Monday April 15, titled "New
Technology Directions in E&P." The session will be presided by HE
Shaikh Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa, minister of oil and industry of Bahrain,
and chaired by GEO general chairman Al-Jarwan.
There also
will be two executive panels at the conference:
Impact of Geoscience Technology in Managing Middle East Reservoirs,
chaired by Anwar Khalaf of Bapco and co-chaired by Khalid Al-Sumaiti
of Kuwait Oil Company.
Speakers will
include Abdul Jaleel Al Khalifa (Saudi Aramco), Gary Jones (Western
Geco), Trevor Burgess (Baker Hughes), Iain Percival (Shell) and Kurt
Rudolph (ExxonMobil).
Advances in Middle East Gas E&P, chaired by Mahmoud Abdul Baqi (Saudi
Aramco).
Invited companies
include Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Qatar Petroleum, Shell and TotalFinaElf.
For the more
adventurous geoscientists, the GEO 2002 program features three excursions:
- A field trip to the Paleozoic
outcrops of Saudi Arabia, organized by Saudi Aramco and the DGS.
- A "sea trip" to the Holocene
of Kuwait, chartered by Chevron and Kuwait Oil Company.
- A field trip to study
the Cretaceous of Oman, organized by IFP and Sultan Qaboos University.
Several courses
will precede GEO 2002, including "Arabian Plate Sequence Stratigraphy"
to be taught by the authors of GeoArabia Special Publication 2. Other
short courses are being organized by the AAPG, EAGE and SEG, in collaboration
with the DGS.