The SPE Podcast

Energy Security underlines oil and gas dominant role in the foreseeable future. However, 85% of CO2 emissions are related to the production or consumption of energy. Hence the important dual role of the O&G community is to safeguard the energy supply while advancing us toward Net-Zero. Scyller Borglum talks with Girish Nadkarni to unpack the complexities of whether we are making sufficient progress, the role of Climate Tech investments, do we need to further democratize Discovery, Development, and Deployment, the role of AI and the O&G sector’s leadership in our march to Net-Zero.

Girish Nadkarni is a veteran thought leader in corporate venture investing. He retired as the CEO of TotalEnergies Ventures in 2022. Among many advisory roles, he serves OGCI Climate Investments, Clean Energy Ventures, and the Stanford High Impact Technology Fund.

Scyller Borglum is the Vice President for WSP USA’s Underground Storage Market in the Energy National Business Line. She is the Deputy Project Manager for the Advanced Clean Energy Storage cavern development in Delta, UT, the first-ever utility-scale hydrogen production and storage facility in the world.

Join them as they answer live questions!

• Speaker: Girish Nadkarni, Climate Tech Investor, Venture Advisor, and Board Member

Join us for an SPE Live on data science applications, opportunities, future trends, gaps, and demands in oil and gas production and operations. In this episode, the SPE DSEA Technical Director and the SPE Production and Operations Technical Director also address people skills & training requirements related to data science for professionals in the energy sector.

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Moderated by Birol Dindoruk, Former SPE DSEA Technical Director.  Professor of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Houston.

In this SPE Live, we discuss how a large oil & gas operator made the decision to encourage young to mid-career petroleum engineers to become SPE certified.

The strategy to pursue SPE Certification was to create an avenue to recognize the level of expertise of our petroleum engineers. It was essential to company leaders to choose a globally recognized certification program such as SPE Certification. Prior to this effort, Saudi Aramco had developed a strategy to manage and retain explicit and tacit knowledge from the experienced retiring workforce through a Corporate University know as Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC). When establishing training programs at UPDC, a critical factor was to identify principle in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) and capture their knowledge. Additionally, UPDC utilizing our in-house SMEs to deliver courses. When creating a program to prepare our young professionals for the SPE Certification, the UPDC was able to leverage existing programs and inhouse SMEs to create a program for preparing to take the SPE Certification Exam.

In this discussion, our guest discusses the details of the program and the success of the efforts as of today, achieving 98% passing rate with over 1200 engineers certified.

Speaker: Todd A. Green, Technical Advisory Group Team Lead at Aramco.

Moderated by Bob Merrill, SPE Engineering Professionalism Committee Chair

Join us for an SPE Live with the SPE Completions Technical Director and the SPE Drilling Technical Director to discuss operations, the latest technologies, and people skills for energy sector professionals.

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Moderated by Peggy Rijken, Incoming SPE Completions Technical Director. Chapter Manager, Geomechanics Technology Center at Chevron.

Leadership has a critical role in ensuring that a desired culture of safety exists within an organization. Good leaders engage their employees in a way that builds trust and yields desired discretionary effort around safety. Research has also shown that companies with an engaged workforce perform better in safety, quality, and financially versus their peers with less engaged workers.

Join this SPE Live Pre-ATCE with Tom Knode and Thomas Hinterseer as they discuss key issues around effective leadership for safety.

Speaker: Thomas Hinterseer, Managing Director and President of the Board of CEDEP

Moderated by Tom Knode, Principal Consultant at vPSI Group LL

Join us for an SPE Live on CCS/CCUS opportunities and challenges for safe storage and decarbonization efforts. In this episode, the SPE HSES Technical Director and the SPE Reservoir Technical Director will address the intersection of HSES and Reservoir technical and non-technical challenges. In a world needing less carbon, CCS/CCUS is an area that will grow globally.

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Moderated by:

Simeon Eburi, SPE North America Regional Director. Reservoir Management Advisor at Chevron

The SPE Energy Transition Symposium is designed to address the critical challenges and opportunities the oil and gas industry faces as we move towards a lower-carbon future. Our goal is to foster discussions, share innovations, and collaborate on strategies to reduce carbon emissions while ensuring energy security.

This SPE Live provides a sneak peek into the upcoming 2024 SPE Energy Transition Symposium, happening 12-14 August 2024 in Baytown, Texas. This symposium is a pivotal event for professionals across the oil and gas industry, focusing on the transition to a more sustainable energy future. We have an amazing and exciting lineup of keynote speakers, panel discussions, and technical sessions that you will not want to miss!

Moderated by Simeon Eburi, Reservoir Management Advisor at Chevron. 2023 SPE North America Regional Director

Speakers:

A major study from ERM, the global sustainability consulting firm, has produced a wealth of insight on a range of topical issues in the field of health and safety. ERM engaged 256 Health and Safety Function Leaders from companies that directly employ 11 million people in addition to many millions of contractors in the 2nd half of 2023. Over 36,000 H&S professionals work with the participating companies which have operations in more than 150 countries and combined revenues of US $7.2 trillion, equivalent to 7.2% of global GDP in 2022. The study builds on earlier studies undertaken in 2018 and 2021.

The engagements with the Function Leaders addressed topical issues in H&S at this time, such as psychosocial risk and the application of AI in H&S, but also revisited a number of themes which were addressed in the earlier studies which are a source of persistent challenge for organizations; an opportunity to examine trends in areas including changing stakeholder expectations, investment in H&S and management of H&S for contractors which undertake higher risk activities in the workplace.

Many fresh insights emerged from the engagements: useful lists of concerns, investments in H&S, uses of AI and approaches to address a broad range of challenges as well as data on ratios of H&S professionals to employees, reporting lines for the function and much more. What has become apparent is that many of the concerns that emerged from engagements with the Function Leaders in 2018 and 2021 emerged once again from the analysis of data in 2024. The context is the pace of change, not just in the field of H&S itself (stakeholder expectations, regulatory requirements, use of technology and more), but also in the nature of work, the composition of the workforce and where work is delivered. The pace of change has accelerated over the last 3 years. And it is clear expectations and impacts on business will continue to rise (the Function Leaders are virtually unanimous on this) and changes in the world of work will continue at a pace. It is not going to get easier.

The data suggest meaningful progress in many areas but also strongly suggest the underlying issues identified in the earlier studies have not been resolved, despite increasing leadership engagement, higher levels of investment and widespread application of software solutions and new technologies. But, in some areas the gap has widened. H&S functions, catapulted into a new paradigm and challenged to access talent with the necessary skills, are stretched, as are the Function Leaders.

Brian Kraus provides a high-level overview of the insights from this seminal study including a number of insights specific to upstream oil and gas.

• Moderated by Sue Staley, SPE HSES Technical Director, and Sustainability Director at vPSI Group LL

For his final podcast as 2024 SPE President, Terry is joined by his son Austin to take a look back at the last 12 months, as well as talk about the future of both SPE and the energy industry.

Designing production separators and actually achieving their desired performance levels in reality can be very challenging. In addition to the vessel size, internals suitable for the operating and flowing conditions, piping configuration, instrumentation, operating practices, and production chemicals all play a role in separator performance. This SPE Live will address some of these parameters assumed in the design, how reality can differ, and try to answer any related questions.

Moderated by Henri Witteveen, Lead Process Engineer at Kranji Solutions.

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