Interview with 2015 SPE President Helge Hove Haldorsen

Abstract

President's interview Where do you see SPE growing in membership in the short to medium term? SPE is a global organization on a mission to share. Petroleum engineers have a passion for their business and SPE has a passion for helping them, connecting them, and providing them with evolving best practices. Also, SPE wants everyone who works in exploration and production (E&P) to help shape the industry’s future since we know that attacking E&P challenges from different perspectives always secures smarter solutions. Therefore, the future of E&P starts with everyone, everywhere. With nonmember petroleum engineers throughout the world, our membership drive will continue because SPE gets better with more perspectives and more diversity. Reed’s Law states that the utility of networks increases exponentially with size. SPE members in turn get better in their trade because they joined SPE. My main point is that this is not just about volume and growth in membership for growth’s sake; it is about value and because we are talking about producing sufficient energy to meet global demand—it is about a win-win for all. SPE has grown tremendously during the past 10 years, from 60,559 members in 2003 to 124,528 at the end of 2013, including student memberships. An overview of SPE’s current professional membership shows centers of gravity in North America, among the majors and oilfield service companies (over independents and engineering firms); among drilling, production, and reservoir engineers (over facilities, management, and health, safety, and environment [HSE] professionals); and among seniors (over juniors). Global SPE membership potential can be estimated by function and aggregated by country and then globally. SPE’s total global membership potential was recently estimated to be over 200,000 professionals. The logical way forward would then be for SPE to focus its forward membership drive on the countries with the largest membership potential and where SPE currently has low penetration rates. Other important membership growth considerations are: In what can be called mature SPE markets such as the United States, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom, we need to make sure that every graduating petroleum engineer joins SPE, that underrepresented disciplines get a membership boost (geology and geophysics, management, facilities, and HSE), and that more professionals working for independents join SPE. With Mexico opening, it is important that SPE quickly start collaborating with existing Mexican societies and associations to find new and innovative ways to share and co-evolve to the benefit of Mexican energy professionals. Mexican professionals will contribute to the global community with unique functional and operational skills in a number of key areas, from the evaluation and production of offshore carbonate reservoirs to offshore improved oil recovery with massive nitrogen injection. We also need to become more involved in emerging petroleum-producing countries, such as Myanmar, Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, and Ghana.