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

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- gy, carbon capture and storage, subsurface energy (and waste) storage, offshore wind farm development, green hydrogen, etc.

Another priority will be to grow our new Sustainable Energy Circle by guiding the ‘transfer’ of members, activities and content into the Circles overlap zones. One of the priorities of the Education Committee is to assess the skill gap between the capabilities of the member communities of the Oil & Gas Circle and those typically required by the emerging Sustainable Energy industry. In the short term, one of the key challenges of the EAGE then becomes meeting our members’ needs in filling this skills gap through our revised education programmes and high-quality workshops and events.

Along the same lines, I see a need from both the oil and gas companies and professional member communities as well as the Sustainable Energy Circle to stimulate ‘outward communication’, rather than only inwards towards other geoscientists and engineers.

Any particular initiatives you would like to promote?

During my year tenure as president, I would like to stimulate and even proactively invite EAGE members to establish new communities within the new realm of our three overlapping EAGE Circles. These communities are considered the building blocks of our Association, and are all self-governed, independent of Circles.

After Vienna, individual EAGE members and groups have already reached out with great ideas, now we need to condense those into communities, activities and content.

How can we accelerate the road to energy transition?

Hard to say. In my view EAGE is still ahead of our peer societies, although we want to cooperate with them and lead by example. We first need to define clear goal posts and measures of success. Specifically for EAGE, I see the energy transition as the movement of our Near-Surface Geoscience and Oil & Gas Circles towards this newly created Sustainable Energy Circle, with increasing overlap between all three Circles as the global ‘new energy’ industry keeps growing.

One proposed measure of success will be the percentage of overlap between Circles. How do we quantify this rather abstract overlap percentage. It can be accomplished through percentage measurements of 1) EAGE membership affiliation choice, e.g., more than one Circle vs. a single Circle; 2) New EAGE communities naturally falling in overlap zones of multiple Circles vs. a single Circle; and 3) Joint events and collaborations between Communities/Circles, in other words, cross-pollination of activities (workshops, side events, special sessions) and content between major events and key EAGE journals. These metrics still need time to be defined clearly. All EAGE members were recently invited to update their affiliations with EAGE Circles and existing communities and this should be helpful.

As a society, the EAGE can accelerate the energy transition process by helping to remove some of the blocks that prevent us from transitioning towards a decarbonised energy mix.

What we need to do

Communicate outwards to improve the image of the oil and gas industry and the sustainable energy sector, and to attract a new generation of geoscientists and engineers.

Facilitate the transfer of skills, knowledge, experience, technologies, solutions and funding from the Oil & Gas Circle to the Sustainable Energy Circle.

Data liberation and digitalisation: we are drowning in a sea of unstructured data, and still not sharing enough data between companies and industries.

Support currently weak business models of sustainable energy by providing our EAGE members and their businesses platforms to share solutions on how to reduce costs, risk and uncertainties and create cooperation, synergy, efficiencies, supporting concepts of integrated energy systems.

What do you like to do outside work?

Since we now live two blocks from the Dutch North Sea shoreline, I am spending most of my spare time at or near the beach with my wife and two children. In Colombia, I summited two ‘Nevado’ peaks, Tolima (5.216 m) and Santa Isabel (4.950 m) with my climbing friends and witnessed clear evidence of the striking reduction of the snow caps. Back at sea level, we have now picked up wave surfing during increasingly hot summers in plain view of an increasing number of offshore wind farms. One could say I still have my eye on the energy transition process, even outside work.