Shared Vision (July 2005)

Attendance is up at SPE-sponsored meetings. One obvious reason for the higher attendance is the health of our industry resulting from strong oil prices. Professionals in our industry recognize that meetings are a very efficient way to find technology solutions to meet the increasing global demand for energy and to network with E&P leaders. But there is a proliferation of E&P-related meetings to choose from, so the smart energy professional is selective about which to attend. SPE sponsors a wide range of conferences, workshops and Forums that must compete with commercially organized meetings. We have to prove that there is a real return on the time you invest in our meetings. Here are a number of reasons I believe that SPE meetings offer the best value for you. - SPE's member-driven planning process ensures that our meetings present focused and relevant topics. We have an incredible advantage because the industry trusts SPE to sponsor well-organized, content-rich events. Our members take pride in putting together timely, interactive programs that other members will want to attend. They find hot topics, review and select technical papers, recruit panelists and speakers, and facilitate sessions. Volunteers make our meetings happen for the good of the industry. Our Forum Series is a good example of how we develop the best possible programs. We have three committee processes ongoing simultaneously for the Forums: a committee is performing a review of the last series, while steering committees are running the Forums for this year and other committees are planning topics for the upcoming year. Our approach is quite different from commercial meetings, which tend to feature well-known speakers but lack the depth of preparation that our volunteers ensure. - The wealth of peer-selected technical papers presented at SPE conferences contributes to the long-term health of the industry. Although other meeting organizers may permit PowerPoint presentations or abstracts, we continue to require technical papers at our meetings because they have a life well beyond the number who actually attend the conference. It is this commitment to technical excellence that has given us the SPE eLibrary. With more than 40,000 papers, the eLibrary is the only comprehensive repository of the best technology available in the E&P environment. About 1,700 technical papers are added to SPE’s eLibrary each year, and become valuable resources that can be accessed for years to come by anyone, from anywhere in the world. We are highly selective in our program-selection process—for our upcoming annual meeting, for example, we selected about 400 papers from over 1,200 submissions. I tell students and young professionals that the best thing they can do to become an expert in their field is to study a paper each day from our eLibrary.