The SPE Podcast

SPE Live Podcast: Technical Director Series – Data Science in Production and Operations – Opportunities, Gaps, and Future Outlook

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.
Speakers:• Hamad Al-Marri, SPE Production and Operations Technical Director. Production and Facilities Development Director at Saudi Aramco• Sushma Bhan, SPE DSEA Technical Director. Board of Director at Ikon Science
Moderated by Birol Dindoruk, Former SPE DSEA Technical Director.  Professor of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Houston.

SPE Live Podcast: Leveraging Expertise to Prepare the Next Generation

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

SPE Live Podcast: Technical Director Series – Completions and Drilling Operations

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.
Speakers:• Robin Macmillan, SPE Drilling Technical Director. Business Development at IBM• Karen Olson, SPE Completions Technical Director. Senior Completions Advisor at Well Data Labs
Moderated by Peggy Rijken, Incoming SPE Completions Technical Director. Chapter Manager, Geomechanics Technology Center at Chevron.

SPE Live Pre-ATCE Series: What Do Leaders Need to Know, and Do, to Improve Safety Culture?

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

SPE Live Podcast: Technical Director Series – CCS/CCUS Opportunities and Challenges for Safe Storage and Decarbonization Efforts

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.
Speakers:• Sue Staley, SPE HSES Technical Director. Sustainability Director at vPSI Group LLC• Rodolfo Camacho, SPE Reservoir Technical Director. Professor at the National University of Mexico
Moderated by:
Simeon Eburi, SPE North America Regional Director. Reservoir Management Advisor at Chevron

SPE Live Podcast: Accelerating the Energy Transition

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:• Tom Blasingame, Professor of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University. 2021 SPE President.• Jane Stricker, Houston Energy Transition Initiative SVP and Executive Director at Greater Houston Partnership• George Koperna, Vice President at Advanced Resources International, Inc. SPE CSRC Governance and Membership SC Chair and CSRC Chair-elect.

SPE Live Podcast: Rising to the Challenge of the Constantly Changing World of Work - A Conversation with Brian Kraus

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
Speaker: Brian Kraus, Associate Director at ERM

SPE President's Podcast with Terry Palisch: "Creating Our Energy Future" - August 2024

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.

SPE Live Podcast: Separation; Design vs Reality

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.
Speakers:o Logan Grim, Senior Oil Process Engineer at Saudi Aramcoo Graeme Smith, Process Engineer at Murphy Oil

SPE Live: Maximizing Utilization of Subsea Well Intervention Equipment

Join us for an SPE Live episode on Subsea Well Intervention with a preview of the upcoming SPE Subsea Well Intervention Symposium on 13-15 August 2024, in Galveston, Texas, where innovation meets the growing demand in this burgeoning market.
This will be a live discussion with industry leaders from domestic and international operating companies about the methods they use to maximize the versatility of intervention processes and equipment to increase return on investment and decrease waste.
Speakers:• Jack Sanford, Senior Advisor at Talos Energy• Agnaldo Magnum de Souza Silva, Implementer of Drilling Rig Technologies at Petrobras.
Moderated by: Billy Pierce, Sr Account Manager at Gilmore
2024 Subsea Well Intervention

SPE President's Podcast with Terry Palisch: "Creating Our Energy Future" - Enhancing Member Value - July 2024

For his July podcast, SPE President Terry Palisch is joined by Simon Seaton, SPE CEO, to discuss the member value survey and what is new with ATCE.

SPE Live Podcast: Generative AI Implementations on Spatial Data

This SPE Live introduces three prominent approaches to generative AI, followed by a presentation of a novel method utilizing two of these approaches to efficiently generate high-quality geomodels essential for understanding the probabilistic distributions of geological properties within a subsurface hydrocarbon play. By combining a hierarchical vector-quantized autoencoder with an autoregressive model, significant acceleration of both unconditional and conditional geomodel generation is achievable through this implementation of generative AI.
Speaker: Dr. Siddharth Misra, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University.
Moderated by Yusuf Ajibola Falola, PhD student, Department of Petroleum Engineering Texas A&M University.

SPE Live Podcast: Energy Transition Through Innovation & Technology – How Europe is Leading the Path

Join us for an SPE Live episode on Energy Transition. Learn how the technical and scientific advancements in geo-engineering can contribute to meeting the challenges of the energy transition with a preview of the upcoming SPE Europe Energy Conference and Exhibition on 26-28 June 2024, in Torino-Italy. This event will join upstream oil and gas technology with clean energy efforts to discuss future pathways of discovery, providing the chance to establish a common ground across disciplines to highlight recent achievements, identifying needs to deploy the value chain of the energy transition, sharing proposed guidelines for optimizing integrated processes and procedures, and discussing the new targets of education in the energy sector.
Guests:
Professor Francesca Verga, Underground Energy Systems Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering at Politecnico di Torino.
Terry Palisch, 2024 SPE President. VP of Technology & Engineering at CARBO Ceramics
Moderated by: Pierre-Emmanuel d’Huart, SPE Europe Regional Director. Head of Offshore Technological Development at Saipem
SPE Europe Energy Conference and Exhibition 2024

SPE President's Podcast with Terry Palisch: "Creating Our Energy Future" - The Crucial Role of Soft Skills in Engineering - June 2024

For his June podcast, Terry focuses on the importance of soft skills for engineers, and how SPE can help you in developing these critical skills.

SPE Live Podcast: Gaia Talk: Biodiversity - Perspectives on Current Issues and Challenges

Join us for a conversation on current issues and challenges associated with biodiversity, and thoughts on the outcomes and opportunities from the COP 15 UN Biodiversity Conference.
Speaker: John Finisdore, Principal Consultant, Biodiversity Water & Nature, ERMModerator: David Shackleton, SaaS Product Manager
Additional Resources:
SPE Gaia Sustainability Program

SPE Live Podcast: Pre-ATCE series: Fueling Innovation. Navigating the Oil & Gas Startup Journey

Coming up with an idea and developing an initial product are only the first challenges a startup faces; getting that product into the market and getting feedback from early customers are important next steps.
This SPE Live explores the different approaches to getting products in front of oil and gas customers. It will also look at how to structure those initial engagements, how to translate initial diligence discussions into trials/evaluations, and where one can get feedback on the product and progress to the next stages in the sales cycle. Large, independent, and national oil companies can be intimidating first customers, but many have programs or organizations designed to specifically engage with startups and small companies.
Speakers:
Bryant Mueller, SVP Sales – Western Hemisphere at Datagration.Ervell Boyd, Energy Ventures Analyst at Devon EnergyJosh Evans – CEO at HiVolt EnergyModerated by Nayeem Chowdhury

SPE Live Podcast: Plug and Abandonment – What’s the Big Deal?

Join us for an SPE Live on a brief introduction to the content that will be discussed at the upcoming SPE Virtual P&A Workshop. This event is intended to identify the technical and regulatory challenges our industry faces and discuss how we are tackling these now and planning for the future. During this SPE Live, we will have industry experts engage in long term well integrity methods and challenges to securing wells during final plugging and abandonment to ensure isolation and protection to the environment. We’ll also talk about adoption of new technologies and why the industry struggles to try new things, especially in the P&A space. Come see a glimpse of the incredible presenters we will have in the coming weeks!
Speakers:
Saulo Aleluia Barcelos, P&A Advisor, Petrobras
Matteo Loizzo, Consultant
Moderated by Bart Joppe, Well Abandonment Leader at Baker Hughes
Additional Resources:
SPE Webinar Series: Virtual Workshop – Transatlantic Plugging and Abandonment Operations

SPE President's Podcast with Terry Palisch: "Creating Our Energy Future" - The Importance of Supporting Academia and Students in Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities in the Industry - May 2024

For his May podcast, Terry focuses on the academic side of things, what the future holds for petroleum engineering, and the importance of supporting our universities and students.

SPE Live Podcast: Fostering Future Leaders - The Impact of Mentorship on Women in Leadership

Join us for an SPE Live on Diversity & Inclusion addressing the advantages of mentoring programs for women. Our guests will discuss why companies are implementing these programs, share lessons learned, and share recommendations for starting this practice.
Speakers:• Celina Gioja, Diversity and Inclusion Professional at Celi Gioja• Emily Firth, Europe Market and Business Analyst at Halliburton
Moderated by Miral Tawfik, Reservoir Engineer at Chevron
Additional Resources:
SPE eMentoring Program

SPE Live Podcast: Hydrogen as Part of the Energy Mix – Commercial and Technical Perspectives

A hydrogen economy envisions using hydrogen as a clean, low-carbon, and versatile energy carrier and fuel. It offers benefits in terms of energy security, public health, and economic development. Initially, Blue Hydrogen manufactured from natural gas in combination with CCS could help diversify our market options while helping to reduce greenhouse emissions. It has the potential to generate new job opportunities for many of us in the O&G Industry.
The global market for hydrogen and fuel cells is expected to grow from $5.5 billion in 2018 to $42.5 billion by 2026. However, Hydrogen is certainly not a silver bullet. A rapid expansion in hydrogen usage also requires that we collectively address several challenges and barriers especially in the areas of storage and transportation. Hydrogen and Ammonia should be seen as complementary energy delivery options that will rapidly expand alongside LNG, renewable, modular nuclear reactors, geothermal and small-scale hydro-projects.
This SPE live will introduce the SPE Hydrogen Technical Section and discuss H2 as part of the energy mix, addressing the investment landscape and technical challenges and opportunities.
Moderated by Zachary Evans, Sales Director Underground Storage, DarkVision.
Speakers:
Thomas Major, Managing Partner at MB Energy PartnersPedram Fanailoo, Director for the Low Carbon Segment for North America at DNVAdditional resources via OnePetro Publications:
Pore-Scale Investigation of Caprock Integrity in Underground Hydrogen StoragePredictive Power of Theoretical Adsorption Models for Hydrogen/Coal System: Implications for Hydrogen GeostorageMultiscale Model for Hydrogen Transport and Storage in Shale ReservoirsIn-Situ Hydrogen Production from Natural Gas Wells with Subsurface Carbon Retention (Open Access)