| From the President’s
Desk One of the
basic goals of the American Association of Drilling Engineers is the
strong commitment to education and to the dissemination of information
among the drilling community. And to this end, the family of nine AADE
chapters across the United States and the governing AADE National Board
have made significant progress over the recent few years. It is with
pride and pleasure that I would like to inform our readers of a few of
these endeavors.
The first being the annual AADE Spring Technical Conference. This
conference is hosted on alternate years by the National Board and by the
Houston Chapter. The National Board’s technical conference has a focus
on general drilling engineering and operations issues while the Houston
Chapter’s technical conference focuses primarily on drilling/completion
fluids management and environmental issues. History has shown that each
conference will have about 30 exhibitors, will be attended by about 400
industry personnel and there will be a substantial amount of information
exchange between operator personnel as well as between operators and
service companies.
This year’s event is chaired by Ms. Kate Darring with BP American
Production Company and will be held April 6th and 7th in Houston. Please
make plans to attend.
Many of the AADE chapters have local study groups that usually meet on a
monthly basis and are focused on information exchange from case studies,
past experience as well as from current research. A good example of this
is the Houston Chapter’s Deepwater Industry Group and their Fluids
Management Group. Average attendance for each of these monthly events
has been 150 drilling professionals.
The AADE National Board and the Houston, Lafayette and New Orleans
Chapters support a public school teaching aid known as the “Knowledge
Box”. The Knowledge Box is designed to provide public school teachers
with the teaching aids and equipment to educate middle and high school
age students about the energy producing industry. There are 18 of the
Knowledge Boxes in use today with some being scheduled for use in
schools as far away as California and Nevada. This program, administered
for AADE by the Offshore Energy Center in Galveston, earned World Oil
magazine’s Best Outreach Program Award for 2003 and is one of the AADE’s
most rapidly expanding endeavors.
Several of the local chapters have been working hard to organize and
provide guidance and support to college level student sections.
Currently, student sections are active at Louisiana State University,
University of Louisiana Lafayette, Texas A&M University, Nicholls State
University, and Colorado School of Mines with more sections expected to
be added soon. It is certainly encouraging to see these prospective
petroleum industry professionals participating in the local chapter
activities.
The Mid-continent Chapter and the Denver Chapter both have ongoing
undergraduate scholarship programs while the Lafayette Chapter and the
New Orleans Chapters contribute and support endowments at Nicholls
State, Louisiana State University and University of Louisiana Lafayette.
The Houston Chapter has an ongoing graduate student program. This
program provides financial support for selected graduate student
projects that are tackling some of the drilling industry’s tough
engineering and operations problems.
And of course, do not forget the monthly chapter meetings that feature
top of the line speakers. These gatherings provide an excellent
opportunity to pick up information that ranges from business operations
to engineering and daily rig operations issues to
safety-health-environmental issues.
However for the record, AADE is not all work and no fun. To support the
rather expensive endeavors discussed above, each chapter usually
conducts multiple membership drives / fund raisers during the year.
These fun but very necessary events range from golf, tennis, fishing and
sporting clay tournaments to cook offs, Christmas parties and formal
dinner dances. So as you can easily conclude, AADE has something to
offer to all in our industry.
It is my pleasure to extend an invitation to you to become an AADE
chapter member if you are not already, and to participate in this
active, growing organization.
Your President,
Andy Ellis |
