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Dear Colleagues,
I have the great honor and pleasure to invite you to
attend and actively participate in the X Simposio Bolivariano
Petroleum Exploration in Subandean Basins, which will
be held in the city of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia
from July 26th to 29th of 2009. This time the slogan
of the meeting is “Learning from the Past, Looking to
the Future” and one of the main ideas we have, is to
request papers that outline ventures in which great
science and technical work were used but ended in exploration
failure. We are all aware of dry holes, these are part
of the nature of our business, and many times the work
done on these ventures is forgotten, or simply stored
in company files as postmortem reports. Discoveries,
on the contrary, are published and widely disclosed,
and lessons from them are assimilated. Learning from
“failures” and the understanding of the reasons for
failure is seldom presented, science is biased against
unsuccessful case histories… and we end up missing a
large percentage of the information! For this symposium
we would like to request papers from brave geologists
and geophysicists that work in companies that recognize
this critical aspect of our business, to present such
case histories; we will also request papers that outline
success stories based on great science – not based on
luck!. I am convinced that we can improve our future
if we better understand the past; I am sure this theme
will appeal to all of you.
Also, the technical program of this symposium will
be more petroleum - oriented than past symposia, with
themes that are relevant and directly applicable to
today´s and near-future challenges.
Some themes will be treated with significant skepticism;
few accepted concepts will be questioned by authors.
Today´s business environment will also be challenged;
because of high oil prices, there is an appetite for
exploration and production projects and more risk money
is available. Is this new capital being properly deployed?
Do newly funded projects meet technical standards? Are
new good ideas being generated? Are we really finding
more oil? We will attempt to provide insight.
Last but not least, in this X Simposio, we will continue
with the mix of technical aspects and social activities
that past symposia have had. See you in Cartagena!
Tomas Villamil
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