How oil and gas technical conferences work: sessions, papers and short courses

A trade show is about things you can touch: pumps, valves, trucks, a rig mast standing in a car park. A technical conference is about ideas that have been written down and argued over. The two often share a building and a week, and people mix them up, but they run on different rules. The exhibition floor is paid for by companies that want to sell. A good technical program is built from papers that are not allowed to sell anything at all.

This guide walks through how that program comes together, what happens in the rooms, and how someone early in their career can get more out of a conference than a bag of pens. I use the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) as the main example because its rules are published and its papers are easy to find later, but most engineering societies work in a similar way.

Trade show and conference side by side

For a broader map of the different kinds of industry gatherings, from receptions to site tours, see the industry events guide.

From call for papers to the podium

Most technical programs start many months before the event with a call for papers (SPE now often calls it a call for proposals). It lists the topics the committee wants, such as drilling, reservoir management, production, or heavy oil, and a deadline for abstracts.

The abstract

An abstract is a short proposal for the paper you intend to write. SPE suggests 225 to 450 words and asks for four things: the objective and scope, the methods, the results and conclusions, and what is new. That last part matters most. A committee reads hundreds of abstracts, and "we did a thing that has been done before, and it worked" does not get far.

Two rules catch people out. A submitted SPE abstract cannot be edited afterwards, because reviewers can start reading as soon as it arrives. And the same abstract cannot go to two conferences at once: it has to be declined by one program committee before it is sent to another.

Committee review

The program committee, usually working engineers and scientists who volunteer their time, rates the abstracts and builds the sessions. SPE says it looks for technically sound work, knowledge not previously published, and nothing commercial in nature. Trade names and company names are supposed to give way to generic descriptions. Some abstracts are accepted for oral sessions, some for posters, and some are kept as alternates who move up if a speaker withdraws.

It helps to know that this is not the same as journal peer review. At SPE, conference abstracts are judged by the committee and the final manuscripts go through a plagiarism check, while papers in the society's journals are reviewed by technical referees under an editor. An author can ask for a conference paper to be considered for a journal afterwards.

The manuscript

Acceptance is a promise. SPE runs a rule known as "no paper, no podium": if the full manuscript is not in by the deadline, the paper is withdrawn and the author cannot present. It also requires a live presentation, in person or online for a virtual event, with an author there to take questions. A paper that is not presented is permanently withdrawn from the archive. The SPE conference paper policies set this out in full.

Inside a session

A technical session is a room, a chair or two, and a run of papers on one theme. Each speaker gets a fixed slot with a few minutes for questions. The session chair introduces speakers, keeps time, and fills an awkward silence with the first question. If you have never watched a chair cut off a speaker who has run ten minutes over, it is worth seeing once. It is done politely, and it is done.

Around the paper sessions you will usually find a few other formats:

• Keynotes and plenaries: senior people from operators, regulators or universities speaking to the whole conference. Broad and well attended, rarely technical.
• Panels: four or five people on stage answering a moderator. Good for hearing where people disagree, light on data.
• Posters: work presented on a board or, at SPE events, as an ePoster on a screen that can carry animation and video. ePoster authors still submit a manuscript. The poster area is where you can talk to an author for twenty minutes instead of two.
• Workshops: smaller, discussion-led meetings where the audience does much of the talking. Bring a question or a problem, not just a notebook.

Short courses before and after

Many conferences add one or two day short courses on the days either side of the main program. They are taught by an instructor rather than presented as research, and they cover a practical subject: well test analysis, an introduction to thermal recovery, gas processing basics. They usually need a separate booking and they fill up.

If you belong to a professional engineering body, check whether it asks you to log continuing professional development. Short courses and technical sessions are the kind of time people record, but each association sets its own rules, so read them rather than assuming.

Where the papers go afterwards

The written paper outlives the talk by decades. SPE manages OnePetro, an online library of oil and gas technical literature from many publishing partners, and papers presented at SPE conferences are published there. SPE releases a conference's proceedings on its first day, so the paper is often available before you have heard the talk. A good habit is to read the abstract of each paper in a session the night before. You arrive knowing which talks you care about and with a question already in your head.

A historical example: heavy oil in Calgary

Calgary has long been a natural home for heavy oil discussion, given how much of the work on the oil sands is planned there. SPE held a Heavy Oil Conference Canada in Calgary in June 2012 and again in June 2013, and the proceedings from both were published by the society. The 2013 program included papers on steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and on bitumen in carbonate rock. Old proceedings like these are still useful: a young engineer looking at a SAGD question today can often find someone who argued over the same problem in a session room years ago. Our hall on heavy oil and the oil sands covers the technology itself.

Getting value as a junior attendee

A first conference can feel like a wall of parallel sessions. A plan helps. Here is a worked example, purely illustrative, for a production engineer with one day.

1. The night before, pick one session that matches your work and one that does not. The second is where you learn the most.
2. Sit near the aisle so you can switch rooms between papers if the program allows it.
3. Write down one question per talk, even if you do not ask it. Ask at least one during the day.
4. Spend the coffee break at the posters, not the coffee. Authors there have time.
5. After the last session, write three lines: what you learned, who you met, which paper to read in full.

People who come back from a conference with three lines like that tend to be sent again. For more on early career steps, see starting a career in oil and gas.

Writing your first abstract

A plain walk-through, using an invented example. Say your team changed how it schedules pump replacements on a group of wells and saw fewer failures.

• Objective: state the problem in one sentence. Pump failures on a set of wells were cutting run time.
• Method: what you changed and how you measured it. Keep company and product names out.
• Results: give the numbers you can stand behind, with the time period and the number of wells.
• What is new: say why another operator would care. If the honest answer is "they would not", choose a different topic.

Ask a senior colleague to read it, check what your employer needs to approve before anything is published, and submit before the deadline rather than on it. If it is declined, the committee has still read it, and the next abstract will be better.