June 2018 Newsletter – Chair’s Address
Hello everyone
SPE’s mission is to share technical knowledge – both with fellow professionals and with the wider public.
The life blood of the SPE Aberdeen Section are the ~150 people who volunteer their time to support our efforts to deliver on this mission, and to make all our activities actually happen.
Some people give a modest amount of time – maybe serving on a technical committee developing one of our excellent technical conferences. They might attend one or two meetings, and do some reviewing of abstracts on their computer – maybe 10-15 hours spread out over 6 months. This sort of input makes our technical events topical and relevant to the needs of our industry here in Aberdeen.
Others might offer to represent the industry at a schools careers fair – a commitment of one or two evenings each year. This sort of outreach is crucial – and we have continued to do this throughout the downturn – encouraging the next generation to think about science and technology – and specifically about the oil and gas industry as a valid career choice.
Some people choose to give more time – and SPE provides the infrastructure to make the most of this. Major initiatives such as the energy4me programme are driven by a small number of people passionate about the idea – we have converted a US educational tool for use in Scotland, and have a rolling programme of training more and more teachers. Another great example is the NASA in Aberdeen initiative where we bring a NASA astronaut and a space scientist to Aberdeen once per year to inspire primary school and early secondary school students to be interested in science.
This whole range of activities is co-ordinated by an Executive Committee, where the volunteers who chair our individual committees meet to steer and guide the whole operation.
As we bring our operational year to a close I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports the sections activities – everyone’s time, everyone’s experience and everyone’s enthusiasm is valuable, is appreciated, and helps make the SPE Aberdeen Section the success that it is.
I wish you all an enjoyable summer break, and look forward to seeing you ate one of our events when we resume in September.
Kind regards – Ian Phillips
P.S. Given the scale of our activities we have a number of people who support what we do – Diane Wood who is our Section Manager, Louise Thomas who is our Section Administrator, Lorraine Mutch who is our Section Accountant, the team at Mearns & Gill who manage our conferences and the Offshore Achievement Awards, the team at think who support our communications effort, and Neil Weightman Digital Media who manage our website. All these individuals and companies are paid for their services – and all embrace the spirit of the sections volunteers and routinely go the extra mile to make what we do that bit more special. A big thank you to all of them as well.
