Geological Society of TT
September marks 20 years since the first cohort of students enrolled in UWI, St Augustine’s bachelor's in petroleum geoscience (PGSC) programme. UWI offers dozens of degree programmes across its campuses, so what makes this one worthy of its own article? With just over 200 graduates in its history, few programmes have had such a direct impact on the country’s economy.
In simple terms, a geoscientist interprets all manner of data to pick the spot on a map to drill for oil and gas and say how deep they need to go. The geoscientists coming out of this programme have played key roles in the exploration for and development of many (if not most) of the oil and gas fields in TT over the past two decades. They have worked across all the operators including BP, BG (now Shell), Repsol (assets now owned by Perenco), Petrotrin (now Heritage), BHP, EOG, Touchstone, De Novo and many others. Many have also been on the regulatory side, playing key roles at the Ministry of Energy in bid rounds, data collection and interpretation as well as management of upstream contracts.
Let’s go back to 1999 to understand why the programme was birthed. TT’s gas industry was growing tremendously with the launch of Atlantic LNG. To supply gas in the quantities needed, fields needed to be found consistently. However, the existing petroleum geoscientists were mainly foreigners and were aging.
How could we get new geos who were also locals to fill the void? Pressure was also coming from the TT government to have more local high-level professionals working in the sector. As 3D seismic surveys became the norm, with it, the growing need for geologists that could also speak the language of the geophysicist.
All of this led to the birth of the undergraduate programme in petroleum geoscience with a real focus on petroleum geology and petroleum geophysics, being introduced into the St Augustine campus in 2001. Several organisations played a pivotal role in getting this degree off the ground – the State represented by the Ministry of Energy and Petrotrin, major upstream companies like BP and BG, our own GSTT and of course UWI. The late prime minister Patrick Manning, a geologist himself, is known to have taken a keen interest in the programme as well. The PGSC degree became UWI’s second geological programme outside of the Mona campus’ BSc in geology.
This was one of the very few geological undergraduate degrees globally to be found within a faculty of engineering, as opposed to natural or earth sciences. As such, students did mandatory engineering courses such as maths, fluid dynamics, engineering management, statistics, among others. These, coupled with the core courses like paleontology, petrophysics, geochemistry, field mapping, petroleum economics, geophysics, sedimentology and mineralogy, created what lecturers used to refer to as “numerate geologists, a rare phenomenon.” The degree was also the first overseas one accredited by the Geological Society of London.
Small class sizes (15 on average) allowed a level of
