2018 is off to an excellent start. I just returned from SPE’s Annual Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference (HFTC) and it was an excellent event. Attendance was higher than recent years and our Oklahoma City Section was well represented with several local authors presenting at the conference. I am excited to see an increase in industry involvement from our section. By getting approval to share your knowledge and experience not only does it help your company gain positive exposure within our industry it helps you develop communication skills in the form of writing and presenting. Each SPE conference requires a paper for a presentation which is part of a “no paper, no podium” policy. The paper is an excellent way to organize your thoughts on your project. It is surprising how much this process can help you learn and answer questions you didn’t know to ask. The process of making the paper also encourages reflection on past projects that may not have taken place without the deadline of a paper to nudge you in that direction. You might be surprised at how much support you can receive from your company to take on a technical paper project but the support might only be permission to publish and words of encouragement. Frequently technical publications are completed outside working hours or during that “free time” which we are really just stealing from something else we would rather be doing. It is worth the effort to publish. If you are ever interested in publishing a paper we can pair you up with an experienced author to help you with your abstract and suggest a conference for you.
Check out our upcoming study groups and technical events in addition to our sporting clays league and Mardi Gras Gala coming up this month. All events are posted on our website at http://connect.spe.org/okc/home . If you can’t remember this website you can always Google “SPE OKC” and select the website from the search results.