Recognizing and honouring scientific advances is an important and integral role of the Association. This can even go beyond our membership, with EAGE’s highest award, the Desiderius Erasmus Award for lifetime contributions to resource exploration and development, which can be conferred upon any geoscientist or engineer in recognition of his/her outstanding and lasting achievements.

We would like to invite your nominations for next year’s awards in the following categories:

The nominations for the 2022 EAGE Awards are open until 31 October 2021.

For more information on EAGE Awards click here.

We are also happy to announce below the winners of this year’s awards. We will celebrate their accomplishment during the Opening Session of the EAGE Annual 2021.

Yanghua Wang

Winner of the Conrad Schlumberger Award 2021

Yanghua Wang, Professor of Geophysics at Imperial College, has had an outstanding career in academia and industry as an inventor, scholar, teacher, leader of research, editor, conference organiser and inspiring scientist. His areas of research originality are inverse Q filters, seismic waveform inversion, modelling viscoelastic wave propagation and seismic processing. His books ‘Seismic Amplitude Inversion in Reflection Tomography’, ‘Seismic Inverse Q Filtering and Seismic Inversion’ are famous. In 2004 he founded the Journal of Geophysics and Engineering, now a mainstream geophysical journal. He has single-handedly steered every manuscript through to final production. In 2019, to fill a funding gap at Imperial, he established the Resource Geophysics Academy with £11.25 m from Sinopec, to fund promising research students from China to study with any supervisor in any area of geoscience and geo-engineering. He organised seismic attenuation workshops in Barcelona 2009 (EAGE/SEG), Singapore 2013 (EAGE) and London 2019 (EAGE). Among his numerous honours is EAGE’s 2005 Guido Bonarelli Award for his oral presentation on surface-related multiple suppression through inversion. For his outstanding achievements and unselfish dedication to his subject, his colleagues and his university, the Awards Committee recommends Professor Wang for the Conrad Schlumberger Award.

Siddharth Misra

Winner of the Arie van Weelden Award 2021

Prof Dr Siddharth Misra’s research focuses on improving subsurface characterization and prospect evaluation for the exploration of hydrocarbons, minerals and water resources. His major contribution is in the theory of electromagnetic responses of geological formations to various charge polarization phenomena. The theory has enabled him to introduce a multi-frequency electromagnetic log-inversion technique to remove dielectric effects for improved estimation of hydrocarbon pore volume.

John Arthur

Winner of the Honorary Membership Award 2021

John is a Chartered Geologist, who has specialised in the application of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics projects since 1965. John pioneered the assessment of marine geological hazards, especially shallow gas, with high resolution, digital multichannel seismic data in the North Sea. He directed major European geophysical programmes for Nirex Nuclear Waste Repository sites at Dounreay and Sellafield, the Trans-Manche Link – the final definitive coast-to coast sub-seabed evaluation – for the Channel Tunnel and the BP/Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Crude Oil Pipeline in Turkey. John’s career began at Wimpey Laboratories in 1963 and progressed to Fairfield Aquatronics Limited. In 1982 John established the consulting company Arthur and Associates which evolved to Top Hole Site Studies Limited. John promoted geophysics for a huge range of civil engineering projects all over the world. In 1974 he became a member of the EAGE. Here, John was one of the main drivers to establish the Environmental and Engineering Geophysics community within the association. With success! Due to his perseverance, John became one of the architects of EAGE’s Near-Surface Geoscience Division in 2001, which he guided as Chairman from 2010-2012. The way John invested his keen mind for the EAGE, especially for the Near Surface community, has been outstanding. The Awards Committee recommends EAGE, to award John Arthur Honorary Membership, in recognition of his services to EAGE’s Near Surface Geosciences for more than a half of a century.

Maša Prodanović

Winner of the Alfred Wegener Award 2021

Professor Maša Prodanović is a talented applied mathematician turned scientist and engineer. She is a worthy winner of the Alfred Wegener Award: like Wegener himself, she is a scientist of considerable imagination, unafraid to pursue new ideas. She is currently an Associate Professor at UT Austin where she leads an active and highly successful research group. She has made many seminal contributions to our understanding of flow in porous media. She has applied rigorous concepts in image analysis and topology to quantify pore structure and fluid displacement, making pioneering contributions to the level set method. More recently she has studied complex pore systems, including carbonates through multi-scale analysis combined with sophisticated rock classification. This work has been extended to shales with studies of nano-scale flow. She continues to pursue innovative ideas, one example being her recent work on grain boundary wetting. But it is not just in academic achievements that she stands out. She has established the digital rocks portal which provides a huge service to the community through hosting images and other results, allowing a free exchange of ideas and data. In addition, she is an inspiring teacher and mentor to students at UT and beyond.

Kees W. Rutten

Winner of the Nigel Anstey Award 2021

Co-authors: Daan den Hartog Jager and Geert-Jan Vis

For their paper "Unconformity mapping in the Schoonebeek oil field, the Netherlands", published in First Break, Vol. 38, Nov 2020.

Impressive paper on the oldest oil field in the Netherlands (date of discovery 1943, development started by Shell (NAM) in 1947). The field straddles in Germany where it is known under the name of Emlichheim. The picking of the Cretaceous unconformity is mandatory because the Valanginian transgressive sandstones depositional features are linked to its morphology so sweet spot recognition is very important in an EOR perspective. The field was shut-in in 1996.

Callum Walter

Winner of the Loránd Eötvös Award 2021

Co-authors: Alexander Braun and Georgia Fotopoulos

For their paper "High-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle aeromagnetic surveys for mineral exploration targets", published in Geophysical Prospecting, Vol. 68, Jan 2020.

The authors demonstrate that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aeromagnetic surveys provide a cost-effective bridge between traditional low-coverage high-resolution terrestrial surveys and high-coverage low-resolution manned airborne surveys in the same area. At 35 m elevation, the UAV survey provided data at 1 m intervals along the line and 25 m line spacing, yielding a much higher resolution magnetic anomaly map than the manned airborne magnetic survey. An additional 45 m UAV survey allowed the first vertical derivative to be calculated, yielding even higher resolution and leading to a new gold discovery. This new technology provides a dramatic breakthrough in the acquisition of magnetic data.

Douglas Watson

Winner of the Norman Falcon Award 2021

Co-authors: Nick Schofield, Alistair Maguire, Christine Telford, Niall Mark, Stuart Archer and Jonathon Hardman

For their paper "Raiders of the Lost Mud: the geology behind drilling incidents within the Balder Formation around the Corona Ridge, West of Shetland", published in Petroleum Geoscience, Vol. 26, Feb 2020.

This excellent study focuses on drilling problems on the Corona Ridge, an intrabasinal high in the Faroe-Shetland Basin. Drilling fluid loss, bit balling, wellbore breakouts and wellbore ‘ballooning’, where lost drilling fluid returns to the wellbore, are all recognised within the Balder Formation along the Corona Ridge. Many of the drilling incidents were traced back to both the lithological character of the Balder Formation and the mid-Miocene tectonic inversion of the Corona Ridge. This geological explanation has wider implications for exploration in the region, including the mitigation of drilling incidents in future wells through drill-bit selection.

Tor Arne Johansen

Winner of the Ludger Mintrop Award 2021

Co-author: Bent Ole Ruud

For their paper "Characterization of seabed properties from Scholte waves acquired on floating ice on shallow water", published in Near Surface Geophysics, Vol. 18, Jan 2020.

This is an excellent technical paper with a unique application of an unconventional seismic method. The Scholte wave theory and rock physics model are well analyzed and clearly presented. It demonstrates the validity of the use of Scholte wave in probing very loose sediments at shallow sea floor under floating ice for S-wave velocity structure, porosity and Vp/Vs ratio, and shows a good result. Although the application areas of the method may be limited, the technical merit of this paper is regarded as significant and worthy of the 2021 Mintrop Award.

Chantelle Roelofse

Winner of the Robert Mitchum Award 2021

Co-authors: Tiago M. Alves and Kamal’deen O. Omosanya

For their paper "Reutilisation of hydrothermal vent complexes for focused fluid flow on continental margins (Modgunn Arch, Norwegian Sea)", published in Basin Research, Vol. 33, March 2021.

Magmatic activity in sedimentary basins has a critical impact on all five elements of a petroleum system: maturation of source rocks, fluid migration, reservoir rocks, seals and traps. 3D seismic interpretation reveals the relative timing and spatial distribution of stacked thermal hydrothermal vent complexes on the Modgunn Arch. This work is vital for assessing hydrocarbon plays or geothermal prospectivity in volcanic sedimentary basins.