Chair’s Address – February 2019
February 2019
Dear SPE Aberdeen members, colleagues and friends,
Last month the finalists of the 33rd Offshore Achievement Awards were announced, and the winners will be revealed at the ever popular black tie event on 14th March. The standard of entries this year was outstanding, leading to a challenging and rewarding judging process! Thanks to the outstanding support from our members and the wider community, this event, along with our other events, continue to go from strength to strength. We use the modest surpluses that we make to give back to our community and to inspire the next generation of industry professionals, from primary school pupils to university students. This has always been a high priority for the section.
At this time of year pupils are making decision on subject choices and careers and our volunteers are very much in demand to attend careers events in school across Aberdeen city and shire to share their experience and expertise. We work closely with Aberdeen Science Centre on a number of projects; through ASC we roll out Energy4me, SPE’s global energy education programme, to schools across Scotland. Last summer we sponsored the Summer of Engineering, an event that ran for 6 weeks and attracted 5000 visitors; this will be repeated again in 2019. We also work closely with TechFest, supporting Maths in the Pipeline and TechFest Science Festival.
Next month we will be welcoming former NASA astronaut Carl Walz and NASA scientist Heather Paul to Aberdeen as part of the NASA in Aberdeen project, now in its 3rd year. Primary and secondary schools and the general public will have the opportunity to hear from the team at a variety of events. This hugely successful project is a collaboration with Energy Institute (EI) and the Society of Underwater Technology (SUT).
Our annual student bursary awards have been running for over 20 years supporting students studying oil and gas subjects. This year we are delighted to be in the position to award bursaries up to a total of £30,000 – the applications are being judged right now. We support five student chapters across Scotland and this support includes helping with transport costs to attend our events in Aberdeen and also offer substantial discounted rates at our events.
In addition to these ongoing projects we have also supported a number of “one off” projects over the years. These include funding exhibits at Aberdeen’s Maritime Museum to mark our 30th anniversary and supporting “Inside Industry”, a career guidance website, the only tool of its kind focused on providing first class oil and gas industry career information and advice, now in over 300 schools in Scotland. We also played a key role in developing a virtual tour of the Captain platform – a resource that is used widely in schools including TechFest’s Maths in the Pipeline. We also helped establish the Northsound 1 Energy Schools Challenge which has been running since 1997.
Supporting this wide range of activities and initiatives is completely dependent on our volunteers’ time, expertise and enthusiasm – I’d like to say a huge “Thank you” to them for their continued support. If you’d be interested in contributing to these great initiatives – or have other ideas on how we could do more, please get in touch at aberdeen.chair@spe-uk.org .
