Five petroleum engineering students from University of Stavanger reached the finals in the prestigous PetroBowl contest.
PetroBowl is a fast-paced quiz competition hosted by the Society for Petroleum Engineering (SPE) since 2002. SPE Student Chapter teams play against each other in a series of quick rounds, answering technical and non-technical aspects of the energy industry.
First, the team from University of Stavanger managed to take second place out of 16 teams in the Europe Contest in March and qualified for the Petrobowl championship. This year’s championship was hosted virtually because of Covid-19 precautions on the 4th and 5th of September.
Even though the format of the contest changed, it was still fast-paced and competitive. 32 teams from leading universities in six regions participated, and the UiS team managed to come in second by winning against the Indian Institute of Technology, Nazarbayev University, University of Zagreb and University of Houston.
The most-winning team in the championship, the University of Oklahoma (OU), was not easy to compete with and the University of Stavanger team came up short in the final. However, this was the first time the UiS team reached the finals of the Petrobowl Championship.
«I believe this achievement is a justification for fantastic hard work and dedication,» Urfan Rahimbayli says.
The UiS team consisted of five master students with different specializations:
- Kwaku Ennin Afoakwa – Natural Gas Engineering (Ghana)
- Urfan Rahimbayli – Drilling & Well Engineering (Azerbaijan)
- Felix James Pacis – Drilling & Well Engineering (Philippines)
- Syeda Vania Mansoor – Petroleum Geoscience (Pakistan)
- Iyad Souayeh – Reservoir Engineering (Tunisia)
In this competition, the students represented the university, SPE Student Chapter Stavanger and SPE Stavanger Section.
«We gained invaluable learning experience which we will never forget,» Rahimbayli says.