Chair’s Address - December 2018
December 2018
Dear SPE Aberdeen members, colleagues and friends,
SPE is the largest individual-member organisation serving managers, engineers, scientists and other professionals worldwide in the upstream oil and gas industry. SPE is for all of today's industry professionals, regardless of experience or area of expertise. Although engineers are the core of SPE's membership, not all SPE members are engineers and indeed the engineers are not all petroleum engineers!
Our membership reflects the diversity of careers available in this industry. In addition to our members doing subsurface and well engineering with operators and service companies, our members include other branches of engineering such as subsea, process, structural and operations, and are also involved in the digital analytics, banking, accountancy, intellectual property and law sectors. Our executive committee (the committee that runs the section and made up our committee chairs and vice chairs) bears this out; they range from a scientist to an engineer to an energy law professor, and from CEOs and MDs to early career engineers and other specialists.
Each year our committees strive to put together a programme of events which meet the needs and interests of our members. Over the years as the demographics of our membership has changed, our programme of events has also evolved and diversified. Our Seismic conference, started in 2017, is very popular with the development geoscience community and grows from strength to strength; we have had to move it to a bigger venue for 2019. Earlier this month we held our first Petroleum Economics Conference and this is followed in 2019 with a number of new events including the cross-sector Pump and Pipes UK event (involving the NHS and space sciences) and the Alternatives to Welding event being developed jointly with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. These events are aimed at sectors of the oil and gas industry that we have not catered for in the past, involving industries which share technology with oil and gas industry. This collaborative approach is hugely valuable to help deliver quality events - we have being organising such joint events very successfully with other societies for many years, including successful events such as DEVEX (jointly with PESGB and AFES) and joint SPE / ICoTA Well Intervention.
SPE is for all professionals in the oil and gas industry and we endeavour to support and cater for all with our events. If there are areas you would like to see covered by our events please get in touch aberdeen.chair@spe-uk.org
