FRESCO MEETING (Future Research Committee) NPD 10.10.2002
Present: Arne Skauge (Hydro), Kjell-Sigve Lervik, Håkon Rueslåtten (Statoil), Alan Burns (TotalFinaElf, Einar Kjos (BP), Kristian Kolbjørnsen (DNO), Arild Haugen (NPD/FORCE)
Agenda:
4. Possible subjects for consortiums between Norwegian research institutions and oil companies
Kjell-Sigve Lervik gave a brief background for the establishment of this committee:
- Government income from oil up, government spending on research down.
-
FORCE can be more effective in stimulating cooperation and get research
institutions to focus on oil company needs - establish Norway as one of the
leaders within petroleum research.
1. Election of chairman for the
committee
It was decided to postpone the election of chairman until the next meeting. The
chairman should preferably have good contacts within industry, academia, the
government, and contractors.
2. Future activities of Fresco
FRESCO should be involved in stimulating cooperation and promoting research both
towards research institutes and universities, and also against the service
industry (contractors).
In addition the committee should also be active in establishing a network both towards other research organisations/initiatives such as NRC, OG21 and do a mapping of current industry research programmes. The ITF programmes in the UK were briefly discussed. It was also stated that it was unfair that FORCE should be blamed for low project activity. This is mainly a problem for the individual oil companies.
FRESCO may have a role in monitoring and
coordinating major company-academia cooperation as well as stimulating new or
existing consortia.
Individual technical committees should review and discuss individual project
proposals.
How do we organize company-university projects? This was discussed.
American style consortium (Stanford)? Is it FRESCO’s role to start this?
Shouldn't initiative come from the Universities?
Universities and research institutes have already come up with proposals, and it is necessary to get a stronger involvment from the technical committees in evaluating these proposals.
3. Status applications to Norwegian
Research Council
Due to illness the NRC representative could not attend this meeting.
Arild gave a short status of the budget situation and the status of project proposals to the Norwegian Research Council. There is an increase in the public funding for next year and FORCE and NRC will be in contact regarding project proposals.
4. Possible subjects for consortiums
between Norwegian research institutions and oil companies
A project from the University of Oslo which could form the basis for a
consortium has recently been distributed. This will be further evaluated by the
Sed-Strat committee.
Einar Kjos described a project called “Step Change Seismic Quality”. It was questioned whether BP would be open for cooperation also between the FORCE – members regarding this. Einar will check on this and try to present the proposal at the next meeting in the Seismic Methods committee October 29.
There are several bi-lateral cooperation projects between individual oil-companies and research institutions, and it may be a challenge to find practical ways of expanding such projects.
It was also recommended to try and establish cooperation between local research and the international activity.
There seemed to be a general consensus that focus should be put on medium to long term research consortiums with a large degree of flexibility. However in order to get approval from management to spend money it was realised that the technical experts needs to do a quality control and evaluation before recommending these project proposals.
The FORCE secretariat will send out a message to the technical committees asking for feedback before December 1st 2002.
Other companies should also be invited to participate in the FRESCO committee.
The FRESCO committee will formulate a mandate proposal which will be discussed at the next meeting December 17 at 13.00 at NPD.
5. AOB There was no other business.