A GROUP of 50 students from Turriff, Mintlaw and Huntly Academy joined Shell for its second annual Girls Energy conference in Aberdeen last month.
The students are all part of the Banff and Buchan College’s Girls Energy programme, which provides training to encourage more women into science, engineering and technology careers and is sponsored by Shell.
They are undertaking the Skills for Work Energy Course along with their usual subjects at school and, with support from Shell UK and Schlumberger, the girls will experience real-life examples of engineering and technology in action.
The theme for this year’s conference was Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). In preparation for the conference, a group of the students visited Shell to meet Paul Garnham, front end project manager, to hear about CCS.
On the day, the students were divided into groups, each team representing a specific viewpoint on CCS, including government, operator, villagers and NGOs, and then tasked with going through the negotiations that a real life project would have to go through – from tackling environmental issues to transport infrastructure.
Technology sector manager at the college David Cook said: “This assignment was set to encourage team building, discussion, research, presentation and negotiation skills, along with the added challenge of putting forward a point of view that was not necessarily the student’s own.”
As part of their Girls in Energy course, students Gillian Swarbrigg (17), Lisa Taylor (16) and Jessica Roche (16) from the Gordon schools, Huntly, had a taste of all the many disciplines within the industry through a work placement with Shell.
They visited Shell’s Tullos building and Sea Field House, to learn about new projects including the Carbon Capture Project for the Golden Eye platform in the North Sea.
They also visited hub meetings for the different offshore platforms and the St Fergus gas terminal at Peterhead.
Last month, energy minister Fergus Ewing, joined Banff and Buchan college principal Paul Sherrington and Shell’s Central North Sea platforms operations manager John Lang to lead the 10 year celebrations of the Shell Engineering Scheme.
The two-year course was established in a partnership between Shell and the college and is designed to enable young people to access training that would allow them to enter the energy engineering jobs market.