Bold Decision To Launch OTC Brought Far-Reaching Results

Abstract

At the very beginning, its planners called it "a bold and significant step." Those were the words used by Joe Alford, executive secretary, SPE, in a May 1968 JPT article to describe "a new interdisciplinary meeting to be known as the Offshore Technology Conference" that would be held 1 year later, 19–21 May 1969, in the new Convention and Exhibit Center in downtown Houston. Nine major US engineering and scientific societies with a combined 370,000 members had agreed to sponsor the event. What the sponsors hoped to accomplish essentially is summarized in the following excerpt from the article: "The new conference will provide a major forum of national importance and scope for the dissemination of technology related to offshore resources and environment. The total benefits and influence of the conference are now beyond prediction, but many knowledgeable persons feel that it will be of considerable value to the nation in our development of oceanography and resources from the oceans." These were no small plans, but it is hard to believe that anyone among those original conference architects, no matter how visionary, foresaw how big, globally important, and even phenomenal that OTC would become. Yes, OTC is the way that most people would soon refer to it, but notably, the initials were not used in that first JPT article. They were used, however, by the time the conference preview article appeared the following April. From the beginning, OTC has been guided by a board of directors drawn from the sponsoring organizations (and later also from endorsing organizations). SPE has provided the principal management and staff resources to manage OTC yearly on behalf of the board. The first conference drew 4,200 people, with 26 technical sessions and 125 technical papers presented, and 200 exhibitors occupying 38,500 square ft of exhibit space. The very first presentation of the opening session, catalogued as OTC 1000, was "The Economics of Oil and Gas Operations Offshore U.S.A.," by Richard C. McCurdy, president of Shell Oil Company. Following this were the presentations "Our Nation and the Sea," by Julius Stratton, chairman of the Ford Foundation; "The Law Governing the Development of Undersea Mineral Resources," by Northcutt Ely of Ely and Duncan; and "Some Results of Deep Ocean Drilling," by Maurice Ewing, director of the Lamont Geological Observatory. A partial list of the technical sessions includesSubsea Operations—How Legal, How Safe?Marine Mineral ExplorationPositioning and Vessel MotionCompletion and DrillingGeophysicsMooringMetallurgical Marine Structural and Operational Problems