A team of five master’s students from the University of Houston’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) earned second place in the North American semi-finals of the Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) Program, a competition organized by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. The event was hosted by TotalEnergies at its downtown Houston office on April 10, 2026.
The competition brought together 13 teams from leading geoscience departments across the United States and Canada. Sponsors included the AAPG IBA Committee, TotalEnergies, Woodside Energy, Chevron, Murphy Oil Corporation, Schlumberger, Continental Resources, EOG Resources, ConocoPhillips, Dynamic Exploration, and GeoSoftware.
The University of Houston team consisted of:
- Amberlee Enger - Source rock and basin modeling
- Ella Claxton - Seismic mapping
- Breno Araujo - Seismic mapping
- Conor Cahill - Tectonics, structure, and paleogeography
- Bilge Sasmaz - Petrophysics, well logs, and integration
Faculty advisors included Paul Mann, Jagos Radovic, and Jose Gorosabel, who served as the Young Professional Advisor. Industry advisors were Daniel Xia of Apache Corporation and Steve Walkinshaw of Vision Exploration.
The team’s second-place finish was based on its analysis of a petroleum data set that included 2D and 3D seismic data as well as well data from the Penobscot Block of the North Atlantic rifted-passive margin offshore eastern Canada.
For its achievement, the team received a $500 cash prize from AAPG to support activities of the University of Houston AAPG student chapter.
UH has a strong history of success in the IBA Program since the inaugural year of the program in 2007 when UH won the semi-finals in the Gulf Coast section. Since 2007, the UH IBA team has won first place in the global competition in 2017 and 2019 and placed third in the global competition in 2024. In other years they placed second in the semi-finals competition three times in 2016, 2020, and 2025 and placed third three times in 2012, 2013, and 2014.
To learn more about the Imperial Barrel Award Program, visit iba.aapg.org.