Aberdeen based Mark Bentley (pictured), AGR’s TRACS Training Director, has been appointed as a member of the Advisory Board to the Foundation CMG Chair programme at the Institute of Petroleum Engineering at Heriot-Watt University.
Foundation CMG (FCMG) recently announced the extension of their funding of the FCMG Chairs, held by Prof Eric Mackay and Prof Sebastian Geiger, which enables the university to train approximately 25 PhD students and 100 MSc students over the next five years, in the areas of reactive flow modelling and carbonate reservoir simulation.
In an effort to develop the programme, the Chairs have established an independent Advisory Board of international leading experts with the remit of providing feedback on the overall aims of FCMG Chair Programme, the integration of the different research subjects, and the timeliness and innovative nature of the research, both from an academic and industrial context.
AGR’s TRACS Training Director, Mark Bentley, will sit on the Board as a reservoir modelling expert. Mark currently teaches along with other colleagues from TRACS Training on the MSc programme in petroleum engineering at the University of Aberdeen. Mark was also part of a delegation led by the British Chamber of Commerce that visited the University of Yangon in Myanmar. The delegation explored opportunities to support regional academic institutions in skills development within the Earth Sciences.
Mark Bentley commented, “I am honoured to take on the Advisory Board role. This aligns directly with AGR’s commitment to the development of the industry’s future technical experts and making skills transfer more efficient. The research groups within Foundation CMG aim to promote and fund academic research in Oil & Gas Reservoir Simulation so it will be exciting to see how this new group of students will address challenges faced by the oil and gas industry today, such as enhanced oil recovery and carbon capture and storage in rocks with complex pore systems.”
Mark Bentley has 30 years’ experience in the oil and gas industry working internationally for both operators and service companies. Mark has written and delivered tailored training courses for BP, Shell, BG, OMV, PDO, Centrica, Maersk, Hess, Wintershall, JOGMEC, Woodside, YPF and Nautilus. He has published numerous articles and papers on reservoir modelling and uncertainty quantification and is a recent co-author of the reservoir modelling textbook ‘Reservoir Model Design’.