Day 2: My First Day at Seminar

      As it turns out, this week NSAI is hosting their annual Oil and Gas Property Evaluation Seminar.  Targeted toward the banking industry, the seminar essentially serves as a two-day introduction to the oil and gas industry so that bankers can better understand the mechanics behind the industry so they will be better equipped to read and interpret reserve reports.  The seminar is advantageous to both NSAI and the bankers in attendance as it introduces the bankers to NSAI while supplying them with enough background so that they know the right questions to ask when presented with proposals.  In addition to my project, I will be attending the seminar today and tomorrow to get a better taste of certain facets of the industry with which I am not yet acquainted.

      After arriving to the Tower Club around 8:00 and having some coffee and light discussion with the bankers sitting around me, the seminar began with introductions from Scott Rees and Joe Spellman, the CEO and Senior Vice President of NSAI respectively.  The morning session began with talks about reserves report reliability, reserves and resources definitions and risk, reserves determination methods, and petrophysics.  Lunch soon followed and I found myself at a table of bankers from JP Morgan.  Listening to their conversations, it was obvious that they were gaining a lot from the seminar and really absorbing all of the information that the various engineers from NSAI were presenting in their sessions.  The sessions after lunch included petroleum geology, seismic basics, isopach mapping, hydrocarbons-in-place, and recovery factors and rates.  While most of the topics mentioned I had heard—if only in passing—at least once before, it was very beneficial to see them all placed within a much larger context and to have their explanations flushed out fully.  At 5:00, the seminar closed for the day and I headed back down to the office to work on my project, creating more graphs of depth versus temperature on a reservoir-by-reservoir basis until 6:30.

      On whole, the most significant experience that stands out from today is the extent to which all of the employees of NSAI and those attending the seminar were interested in my presence.  Throughout the day as I introduced myself and explained my attendance at the seminar and my internship at NSAI, their reactions were rather uniform: they all were impressed that I was taking an interest in the industry at such a relatively young age and without fail, mentioned that they wish they had this opportunity when they were still in high school.  While many asked numerous questions about what I plan to do in college in the future and what I was gaining from the seminar thus far, the overreaching trend was what a wonderful opportunity it was to be able to get a head start and gain some key insights into the industry even before college.