News

UT PGE Students Place in SPE Regional Paper Contest

June 17, 2024
    • TWITTER
    • LINKEDIN
    • FACEBOOK
    • EMAIL

Two Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (UT PGE) graduate students have placed in the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) regional paper contest held in Houston in April. Agustin Garbino (MSPE 2024) won the master’s division, and Tesleem Lawal (MSPE 2020, PhD PE 2024) placed third in the PhD division.

Garbino will advance to the international competition, which will take place at SPE’s Annual Technical Conference and Exposition (ATCE) in New Orleans in September. His paper, “A New Algorithm for Automated ISIP Interpretation,” discusses an automation workflow he coded in Python with Associate Professor Nicolas Espinoza, who leads UT Austin’s Energy Applied Geomechanics Laboratory (EAGLe). Garbino also presented at the 2023 Geothermal Rising Conference last October, won the master’s division paper contest held by UT Austin’s Society of Professional Well Log Analysts (SPWLA) chapter in March, and will present research on hydraulic fracturing modeling at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC) later this month.

Lawal presented his research, “Aqueous Nanobubble Dispersion of CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery,” at SPE’s Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in April. He presented similar research, “Aqueous Nanobubble Dispersion of CO2 for Geological Carbon Sequestration,” at the Energi Simulation Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, last October. His research is supervised by Associate Professor Ryosuke Okuno through his Energi Simulation Industrial Affiliate Program (IAP) on Carbon UTilization and Storage (ES CarbonUT), which consists of nine major projects in the areas of carbon capture, conversion, transportation and storage; enhanced oil recovery (EOR); and hydrogen energy.

UT PGE students Jinchuan Hu (PhD PE 2025), Bruno Reinoso (MSPE 2024), Zaina Alfakher (BSPE 2025) and Ibrahim Chaudry (BSPE 2024) also represented the department at the regional contest. They qualified for the regional competition after participating in the local competition held on campus in February, where Hu placed second in the PhD division, Reinoso placed second in the master’s division, and Alfakher placed third in the bachelor’s division.

Dig Deeper