It’s not my job to be Mr Popular and my “postbag” can be quite interesting after some of the observations I have made on the Energy Voice.
Right now, I’m at Offshore Northern Seas, which is for me unquestionably the best of the Big Three offshore oil shows, the other two being OTC and Offshore Europe.
It has a lot to do with the quality of the conference programme, though the manner in which the host cities handle these periodic influxes of Big Oil folk also plays it part.
In the mid-1990s, I observed from one ONS that Stavanger celebrated energy but that, at Offshore Europe time, Aberdeen took the money but was broadly disinterested in celebrating that great windfall called North Sea oil & gas.
As for Houston with its much larger and far more diverse economy, OTC has in my experience just been one more show in the annual cycle of mega-events including possibly the largest annual gathering of hobby quilters in the world.
Don’t laugh, quilt making is a serious and wonderful craft; The Management is superb at it and she is the reason why I’m aware of the annual Houston jamboree which I have been told can be larger than OTC!
This year’s ONS programme has more than met my expectations, attracting luminaries like Daniel Yergin of “The Prize” fame; Lord Browne of Maddingley; Eldar Saetre – president and CEO – Statoil; Ben van Buerden – CEO Royal Dutch Shell: Mohammed Al-Quahtani – senior VP upstream at Saudi Aramco and so-forth.
Moreover, this programme was very much about energy transition and rightly so. It is a programme that Offshore Europe needs to learn from, IMO.
But it wasn’t perfect; nothing ever is.
And one thing especially irritated me. It was the way Transocean president and CEO Jeremy Thigpen got away with an armchair Q&A about RIG and all the usual guff about how it is riding the current offshore economic storm.
The moderator was Cecelie Hellestveit, a Norwegian PhD in international law. Sadly, this was a schmooze session. She should have been tough and wasn’t.
Texted questions from the floor had been invited at the start, so I quickly cobbled one and sent it.
My question to Thigpen was HSE-related. It read: “Transocean is thinning out its fleet. But are you satisfied with the approach to that process? I refer to the Transocean Winner.”
Near the end of the session, Hellestveit checked her pad and said there had been no questions from the audience. I muttered.
Thigpen had got away with it and swept out rapidly with his minders after his slot in the programme. Zooooom! Gone.
I had been thwarted.
In my view there’s over-reliance on iphones and ipads and pre-written questions these days. They’re too conveniently ignored, “lost” or whatever.
What’s wrong with straight questions from the floor?
That’s something for ONS to note in future and for Offshore Europe to remember.
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