Rocky Mountain Rendezvous in Laramie, Wyoming

Okay, I'm somewhat caught up on sleep, but the reality of how much homework piled on while I was in Laramie is cruelly sinking in. I don't really plan on getting a whole lot of sleep this semester; I'm already feeling burnt out on school. If I don't blog this now it won't happen, so here's the story of my trip to the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (rhymes with mouse) in Laramie, Wyoming.

The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous is sort of like a career fair, but that's an unfair comparison. This is much more than that. The first day was a semi-useful resumé and career workshop, but the next day was one of the best geology field trips I've ever been on: a trip through some incredible scenic geology in the Hanna Basin of southern Wyoming. I've already shared the two panoramas I took from the trip, now I'll share the rest of the trip with pictures:

A wind farm near Laramie, WY.

This is called the "Beer Mug Anticline." No one was sure why "Beer Mug," but it's a spectacular anticline, the beds are folded very dramatically.

This is the panorama of the Ferris Formation that you've seen before.

This is a boulder that has fallen downhill from the Ferris Formation, and you can see that it's upside-down because there are courser grains on the top than on the bottom. The top of this boulder represents the bottom of an ancient river channel.

Here's the Ferris Formation outcrop up close, and you can see the curved bottom of an ancient river channel. Since the beds are tilted vertical, you'll have to tilt your head to the left to see how it was originally.

These iron concretions formed after the sand was already deposited. As water flowed between the grains it left iron behind, and cemented the grains together around the iron first. These weather out and form little balls of sand with iron cement in the middle.

This is an outcrop of the Morrison Formation near a reservoir. The Morrison Formation is famous for fossils, but this picture is purely scenic.

Another artsy picture of the Morrison Formation.

These ripple marks were formed by waves when the Morrison Formation was originally deposited. The penny is for scale.

This rock has broken, revealing the ripples between layers.

These are interference ripples, like you see in a swimming pool. You can see two directions of ripple marks in one place, and in this case you can see the cross section in the left of the photo, and in the foreground you can see where I broke it open revealing the ripples themselves and also a cast of the ripples.

The depression in the middle of this photo is a sauropod footprint. I don't have scale, but I could fit my entire shoe in one of the toes with room to spare.

This is a cast on the underside of a rock layer of a foot print from a pterosaur, which is this bird-like thing:

Here's another one with a pen for scale.

And this is the Pine Ridge Sandstone outcrop that was our last stop.

So that was the extra-cool field trip. You probably have to be a geologist to really appreciate the extra-coolness of it.

The next day was a short course on oil production and development. It was a very good course, taught by people from Shell Oil, that combined the geological aspect of oil exploration with the engineering aspect of production and even included the business aspect of the oil industry. As they talked about the cost of producing oil, the sheer numbers are staggering. Exploring is expensive enough, and every time they drill a hole it can cost between $400,000 to $1,200,000 every day to operate a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and then you have to spend similar amounts to recover the oil. Hurricanes can ruin everything; in fact, every step of the process has incredible amounts of risk that can be devastating for the company producing the oil. As I hear people talk about the ridiculous cost of oil and come up with idiotic plans to bring the cost down by boycotting a single company (which has no chance of working, by the way), I get very frustrated. If there's no chance for major profit to offset the incredible risks involved with oil production, who in their right minds would do it? Especially when it means dealing with the government every step of the way, trying to tell you how to do your job!

As part of the course, we were divided into four groups, each one of which was a mock oil company (we named ours "Crude Oil", just so we could use the word crude). The four companies were collectively presented three different possible oil plays, one of which was small but an almost sure return on investment, one that had huge potential but was also a huge risk, and one in between. We examined the data and made recommendations to our "Vice Presidents" on which wells to drill, and the V.P.s negotiated with each other on possible joint ventures and made decisions based on our assigned budgets on what to bid on what property.

Our V.P. made a spectacular bid of $205 million on the big risky well, beating the nearest competitor by only five million. We offset that risk by winning a bid on the mid-range well also, and both bids were joint ventures with another company. The smallest competitor won the small well, and bought a 17% interest in the big, risky one when it was discovered we didn't have enough money to drill after buying the land. Since these were data from real wells, we got to see the "results" of our acquisitions. The little well was a big payoff, which was good news for the little competitor. The big well was dry, which was bad news for everyone. In fact, it was such an expensive loss that it took the little company into the red, with just a 17% interest. Fortunately the mid-sized well was a decent payoff, and we'd been smart enough to buy 66% of it, enough to bring us back into the profit range, but not our joint company. Just before reading the results, though, the Shell people informed us that each member of the winning company would receive a $50 gas card. The company I was in won with $330 million "profits," and each of us $50 of gas richer. Plus, everyone who took the course is getting a free textbook on oil exploration in the mail, that would otherwise have cost $150. It looks like a good book, I'm excited to get it.

After the short course was the official presentation of the geology posters, where those of us presenting them stand next to them and present them to the oil recruiters and other people at the event. Two of us from BYU-Idaho presented posters on research we're doing as undergraduate students, the only undergrads with posters; all the rest were students working on M.S. and Ph.D.s. The posters were judged (kind of like a science fair), and Tyson and I both won honorable mentions that came with $100 checks. Tyson at one point was even asked by a University of Wyoming faculty member what graduate program he was in, and was shocked to hear he was just a junior, so winning honorable mention against grad students is pretty cool. Plus it brings my total net earnings on the trip to $300, when you include the gas and the book.

The rest was interviews for internships with oil companies and well-logging companies, who are the ones that look at the drilling debris and analyze the wells. Since the oil companies mostly hire grad students, those were more for face recognition for next year; but there's a pretty good chance for those of us who went to get well-logging internships.

So that was my trip to Laramie, Wyoming. I went last year, too, and I'll go next year and take more photos; the field trip is different each time. For now, I'm way behind on my homework.