Winning teams to be announced on Feb 22

KUWAIT CITY, Feb 20: The Shell companies in Kuwait, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Energy Center for Engineering Consultancy, today held the first Pre-Engineering Design Competition. This new prestigious engineering competition for high schools was launched earlier in October last year.

During the competition, held at the Safir Hotel at Fintas, 23 school teams showed off their designs for a catapult. The panel of judges marked the designs on features such as power, strength and energy as well as other engineering aspects. Three winning teams will be announced in a ceremony on Tuesday, Feb 22, 2010. Each winning team will receive a valuable cash award, and the overall winning team will also receive a trophy for each team member for the best overall creative design.

Commenting on the competition, Shell's chairman in Kuwait, Ahmed Mouti said: "The Pre-Engineering Design Competition is a new initiative to attract students to practice engineering concepts in a fun way. Students got to utilize their skills to work effectively as a team, build on the catapult design concept, create it and execute it under supervision from the competition advisors who volunteered at each participating high school.

"We wanted to help students in developing their confidence, as well as providing encouragement to consider pursuing careers in engineering. We believe that this competition has succeeded in achieving objectives and we are already looking forward to repeating it later in the year.

"We would like to express our appreciation to the minister of Education Dr Moudhi Al-Homoud and Engineer Waleed Al-Khamis, Head of the Competition Organizing Committee, who have both helped in making this project a reality in Kuwait.

The winning teams will be announced at a special ceremony at the Safir Hotel, Fintas on Tuesday, Feb 22, under the patronage of the Minister of Education and senior representatives from Shell, Ministry of Education and Energy Center for Engineering Consultancy.

For more than six decades, Shell has been working in partnership with Kuwait to bring its crude oil to international markets. From those early days our business in Kuwait developed to include exploration, oil trading, lubricants, technical services, and chemicals sales.

Shell staff in Kuwait are based at Kuwait Shell Limited (KSL) and our new company, Shell Kuwait Exploration and Production (SKEP). Through their network, all local staff have access to Shell's global expertise.

Shell Lubricants' distributor, Al-Hafez Trading, supplies the local lubricants market and has more than 15 percent of the market share. In Kuwait's refineries much has been achieved over the past few years by Shell Global Solutions, in partnership with Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC).

Shell has a number of international joint ventures with Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (KUFPEC) and, in 2005, extended our collaboration with Kuwait through an MOU with Kuwait Petroleum International (KPI) to develop projects in global markets.

In 2009, Shell made its first Liquefied Natural Gas delivery to the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) floating terminal to help meet peak summer demand.

Recently, Shell and Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) signed an Agreement for development of the Jurassic Gas fields. Under the agreement, Shell will deploy a number of technical experts to Kuwait through SKEP to support KOC in managing the ongoing development of the Jurassic Gas fields.

© Arab Times 2011