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EAGE Vienna in the picture
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Edinburgh awaits NSG 2023
Organic chemistry future event
Guiding EAGE’s next energy transition steps New president EAGE Edward Wiarda shares his personal career journey to date and how he envisions the next stages in EAGE’s evolution in the energy transition era. What attracted you to geoscience? My childhood vacations typically had a backdrop of mountainous surroundings and were dotted with hill walks, while looking upwards for birds and downwards for shiny rocks and crystals and poorly-defined fossils. A Dutch boy from a flat country, I took to heart at a young age the quote ‘one only needs one geoscientist to ruin a mountain vacation’ as I kept pestering my poor father (a public prosecutor) about how these fantastic folds came to exist. An early IMAX viewing of a documentary film about the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’ got me hooked on geosciences. Along my academic journey across BSc and MSc curricula in geophysics and earth sciences at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, I took on specialisations in exploration geophysics, data processing and inversion, and the seismic imaging method. Highlights of your career to date In my early career as seismic data processing engineer and later as depth imaging specialist with WesternGeco and Schlumberger in London/Houston, I reprocessed large volumes of vintage 3D seismic surveys, typically from the 1980s and 1990s, which
frequently had a significant business impact for a wide range of operations in the North Sea, the Angolan Kwanza Basin, and in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2015, I took this experience, knowledge as well as my family from London to Bogotá. Ecopetrol, the national oil company of Colombia, had offered me the opportunity to join its geophysical exploration operations team. In those days, Ecopetrol had set in motion a transition from classical E&P of onshore heavy oil towards offshore gas exploration, in which reprocessing of vintage 2D and 3D seismic, new 3D seismic acquisition, and inversion of these datasets played a pivotal role. During my time with Ecopetrol, I worked with some of the brightest and most dedicated geoscientists I had encountered in my career, and a very talented EAGE LATAM office, and had the opportunity to visit a lot of the beautiful countryside of Colombia and its inhabitants. Your current job at EBN After six fantastic years overseas, I repatriated with my family back to The Netherlands, where EBN has enabled me to complete my own personal energy transition as a geophysicist by assigning me to the SCAN programme. This includes an ambitious FIRST
Edward Wiarda, president EAGE.
geothermal exploration campaign across The Netherlands as well as CCS initiatives. What’s next for EAGE? Now that we have updated the Association’s mission statement and firmly established a renewed framework of three partially overlapping EAGE Circles, i.e., Oil & Gas, Near-Surface Geoscience and Sustainable Energy, the next steps are to populate this space with active communities, high-quality events, a healthy pipeline of articles into our journals and relevant content on social media. In this effort, the EAGE needs to continue to evolve in line with the global energy transition towards clean energy, while continuously listening to our members’ needs, expectations and challenges. The first way is through ‘accrual’ of emerging clean energy and decarbonisation technologies with their associated members and industries, including geothermal ener-
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