PetroChallenge Denmark is an annual learning event getting students involved in the challenges of hydrocarbon exploration.

Students are working in teams of three and four. Each team is an oil and gas company searching for petroleum in the subsurface using the learning simulation OilSim. The winner is the team that is able to create the highest value compared to the investment required.

To succeed in the quest, the students need to work effectively both in their own teams as well as in collaboration with other teams. Other teams might be from other schools, and teams provide each other with advice and sharing of risk.

During the event, teams study environmental, geological and geophyscial surveys, bid for licenses, drill exploration wells and hopefully end up finding commercially viable oil and gas fields.

Many Danish schools have made PetroChallenge an annual learning event, as the teachers and students have found it to be an engaging and effective teaching tool.

PetroChallenge supports individual subjects in the curriculum and can be applied as an interdisciplinary approach. It challenges the students in a variety of subjects including physics, chemistry, maths, social and environmental studies, politics, business, economics, collaboration within and outwith the group, as well as reading and writing English.

Schools can register as many participants as they like, and the event is applicable to both first, second and third year students. In many schools all the first year students or all the second year students participate, and in other schools it is just one class that joins in.

All participation in PetroChallenge Denmark 2012 is free of charge and the ressources required are only the student and teacher hours involved, as well as internet access and one OilSim compatible computer per team.

Facilitator Training Day

Teachers will be trained as OilSim and PetroChallenge facilitators on the facilitator training day at DTU (the Technical University of Denmark) on 28 September 2012. Although this day is optional, it comes highly recommended even for teachers that have participated in previous years.

The day starts with breakfast, an introduction to the oil and gas universe and a presentation by Professor Erling H. Stenby, Director of CERE (Center for Energy Resources Engineering at DTU), who will provide an overview of the conditions and challenges of today's oil and gas industry.

Then a lead facilitator from Simprentis will provide an introduction to OilSim, and the teachers will work in teams to solve all the challenges as the students will encounter at the main event. The purpose is to enable the teachers to facilitate the student learning with introduction, support during simulation play and debriefing. In addition to covering all the details of the simulation, the Simprentis lead facilitator will provide advice on facilitation and how to maximize the learning outcomes. The Facilitator Training Day can be expected to be in English.

The Faciltiator Training Day concludes with a debriefing session, where all questions can be discussed and, hopefully, resolved.

DTU will provide breakfast, lunch, afternoon cake, tea, coffee, and water. Moreover, DTU will reimburse travel expenses, so teachers are only required to sign up and be active throughout the day.

Main PetroChallenge Event

The Main PetroChallenge Denmark 2012 Event will take place at the individual schools. Teachers introduce the teams to each phase, support the teams as they solve the challenges, and provide feedback during the debriefing sessions. Teams participate through the web interfac, where they study surveys, communicate with others and input their decisions.

PetroChallenge Denmark is a nationwide competition, where elements like team work, collaboration between teams, communication in English and Danish, understanding of market mechanisms in the oil and gas industry, spacial understanding and a systematic and scientific approach all are necessary to get ahead and be victorious.

PetroChallenge competitions are being held in many countries, and each season ends with an international PetroChallenge final in London, UK, where the winning team in PetroChallenge Denmark 2012 will compete against the other national winners for the grand prize.

In OilSim you start out in a new petroleum province where no oil and gas exploration has been carried out before. First, you study magnetic and gravimetric surveys to identify the regions (sedimentary basins) where oil and gas might be. Then, you move on studying geological interpretations, environmental reports and seismic surveys to narrow down the list of interesting areas. You compete against the other teams to get the best license areas, and you get into partnerships to share the risk. You study even more surveys, before you contract rigs and other providers to drill exploration wells to discover whether there is oil, gas or nothing in the prospects, you have identified. You drill delineation wells to appraise the size and quality of the discovery, and you study economical figures to decide whether to relinquish, sell or keep the license.

OilSim covers the whole upstream oil and gas decision process from exploration, through field development and production of oil and gas, to ultimate abandonnement of the fields. Due to time limitations, only exploration is covered in PetroChallenge events, and thus teams do not construct production facilities nor do any commercial extration of oil and gas.

The main PetroChallenge Event is divided into two distinct days:

• On Day 1 teams are introduced to OilSim, go through the whole process and have a chance to explore all corners of the simulation and learn from their mistakes.
• On Day 2 teams start from a clean board, and go through the whole process again. This time, however, there is little room for mistakes, and teams are expected to optimize their results.

Only Day 2 counts in the competition, and towards the end a winner is found.

Education and Oil Day

PetroChallenge Denmark concludes with an Education and Oil Day at DTU. The day starts at 10:00 and ends around 16:00.

Professor Anders Overgaard Bjarklev, President of DTU, introduces everyone to the university and then the program continues with a focus on DTU as a university, which educational studies are being offered at DTU, and the campus environment. This provides the students with a great source of inspiration and information about what DTU can offer, the physcial location of DTU and how DTU looks like. This is usually very popular. The first part of the day also includes relevant presentations about the reserach done at the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Center for Energy Resources Engineering at DTU.

The second part starts after lunch, and the theme is oil and gas. The two sponsors, DONG Energy and Maersk Oil and Gas, provide educational presentations about the conditions and activities in the oil and gas industry. Professor Erling H. Stenby  will deliver the last presentation on oil and gas in Denmark.

The day will conclude with a prize ceremony where the best three teams of PetroChallenge Denmark 2012 will get awards.

Everyone that participates in PetroChallenge Denmark 2012 can participate in the Education and Oil Day. CERE at DTU will reimburse travel costs making the day effectively free of charge.