A team made up of students from Técnico’s PhD programmes in Earth Resources and Petroleum Engineering and Master’s in Energy Resources Engineering has won the ‘Critical Thinking: Excellence in Critical Thinking in the Assessing of Geoscience Data’ award in the 2022 edition of the international SEG EVOLVE 2022 program.

The team, ROCK ET Team, supervised by Professor Leonardo Azevedo and composed of PhD students Ana Filipa Duarte and Roberto Miele, and master’s students Inês Carvalho, Stela Sofia Brito and Manuella Campos was initially selected to participate in the edition of the SEG EVOLVE 2022 program. 11 teams from several Universities around the world participated in this edition.

For 6 months, the 11 selected teams were put to the test in a multi-disciplinary and experimental challenge, using real-world data, to identify the best investment opportunities related to the sustainable exploration of energy resources and geo-storage of carbon dioxide in the geographic areas assigned to them.

The ROCK ET Team’s challenge was to explore and study the Cooper Basin (South Australia) dataset to identify the presence of natural resources and cost-effective reservoirs for Carbon Capture and Storage to mitigate their environmental impact. The final results were presented at the annual SEG IMAGE 2022 Conference held in Houston, Texas, USA. The work developed by the Técnico team was presented to a panel of international experts on related scientific areas and distinguished for the students’ ability to integrate data from different sources, critical thinking interpretation and modelling.