Ane Lothe, Research Scientist at SINTEF Petroleum and Energy

June 1992: Bergen was displaying the ‘nice’ side of its notorious weather, but the mood of a young university student from Sandane in Nordfjord was miserable. A year of studying maths had gone up in smoke, and her dream of a future in physics was crumbling. At about the same time Gudmund Hernes, the Minister of Education, was implementing one of his ideas by opening a new course of study in geology on Svalbard. Ane, the young lover of the open air, counted up her university entrance points, found that she had sufficient and set course for the most northerly university in the world. A few months later, the 21-year-old had a place on the geology course, a rifle and her own snow scooter. She was ready for field work in the realms of the polar bear.

“My parents were not particularly happy about it. They realised that I was finally rejecting life as a farmer on our family farm,” says Lothe in her characteristic Western Norwegian dialect.

Four years later, she had landed a job with SINTEF Petroleum Research in Trondheim, where she was set to work on a major EU project on CO₂ sequestration under the seabed.

“At that time there was a great deal of pressure for as many people as possible to take a doctorate. When I started in the job, I made it quite clear that was not my goal.”

Once again, however, the young woman changed course. The job became so interesting that when Norsk Hydro advertised for a doctoral student, Ane Lothe accepted the challenge after all. Last summer, her proud parents could read about their daughter’s doctorate and academic success in ‘Firda Tidend’, their local paper.

“EAGE, the international association of petroleum geologists, attracted four thousand scientists to its annual conference in Madrid this year. Great was Ane’s surprise when she was told a month ago that she was to be awarded a prize at the conference,” wrote the paper.

“By relating knowledge gained from doing research on small samples in the laboratory to what we can observe in a sedimentary basin, I brought what we can see on the small scale and the large scale a little closer to each other. But I never expected that it would attract so much attention.”

Nevertheless, the prestigious Falcon Prize for the best scientific article in the journal ‘Petroleum Geoscience’ was awarded to the young scientist and her co-authors.

“Our work resulted in the further development of a computer program that can reveal high pressures in potential petroleum reservoirs. 
This could be a useful tool both for preliminary studies and during the drilling process itself,” explains Lothe.

Oil companies such as Hydro and Statoil are now using the program to explore for hydrocarbon on domestic and overseas prospects. But in spite of her professional success, the scientist sticks to an eight- hour working day, not least because she loves walking in the mountains and is an active member of the Norwegian Mountain Touring Association’s Mountain Sports Group. And when she is not out climbing mountains, she may well be hanging from an indoor climbing wall. For Ane Elisabet Lothe, mountains are both playground and subjects of research.

www.sintef.com/falconaward
www.sintef.com/petroleum/basin