In April 11, 2016, there were 18 WVU students in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering major and Dr. H. Ilkin Bilgesu as WVU Student Section of AADE advisor went to Houston, Texas to join AADE Technical Conference & Exhibition 2016 in April 12-13. The AADE hosted this event that covered improvements and innovations in drilling, completion, cementing, and fracturing fluids.
The conference was placed in Hilton Houston North Hotel, 12400 Greenspoint Dr. Houston, Texas. The students attended several interesting presentations from many professional petroleum and drilling engineers. There was also a student poster competition in the Hotel lobby. There were two students participating in this competition, Ian Collins competing in Undergraduate level, and Tawfik Elshehabi in Graduate level.
Student poster competition was presented in the first day. First presentations were the Undergraduate level which only had two undergraduate students competing. Ian Collins presented his topic about “Assessment of the Environmental, Performance, and Economic Impact of Drilling Fluids Systems Used in the Marcellus and Utica Shale Plays in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.” In the Graduate level, Tawfik Elshehabi who was competing with other nident representaives from other universities presented his topic about “Impact of Gas Solubility on Well Control Operations While Drilling with CasingLiner using OBM.” Fortunately, Ian Collins won a second place for Undergraduate Level. However, Tawfik Elshehabi already performed well with his interesting topic. In the second day of the conference, Tawfik Elshehabi presented again his professional paper about “”What are the Well Control Complications While Drilling with Casing or Liner?”
After attending AADE Conference for two days, in the next day, all WVU students went to two different field trips which were Wild Well Control Inc. and Newpark Drilling Fluids. Seven students with Dr. Bilgesu went to Wild Well Control and ten students went to Newpark.
What a nice week for us! We could attend both conference and field trip in Houston, Texas. We got a lot of valuable experience there.
AADE WVU 