Offshore Technology Conference Impressions

This week is the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Texas. This is an enormous and important event at which the latest advances in technology for offshore oil and gas exploration and production are publicly presented, and usually for the first time.

I attended Monday through Wednesday, and can say that compared to recent years the attendance is very good and there is a spirit of optimism for the future despite the recent and tragic BP platform fire and subsequent major leak of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. I saw very, very few BP engineers at the conference, especially compared to prior years. I am sure it is “all hands on deck” in BP’s engineering departments. A BOP failure is such a rare event that they must be looking at every component in the system, including the human factor and the complex software that assists with platform operation.

General Electric (GE) Energy was probably the largest single exhibitor on the vast trade show floor of the Reliant Center. They have grown by acquisition into a massive oilfield equipment supplier. They showed full-sized 30-foot tall wellhead hardware, downhole completion tools, pipeline tools, full-scale gas turbine generators, and a huge array of other products vital to offshore production operations.

Plastics were well represented with numerous vendors showing high performance thermoplastics such as PEEK, fluoropolymers, and engineering polyamides. In addition to the array of precision part fabricators, the advanced resin developers such as DuPont, Evonik, Solvay Solexis, Victrex, Arkema, and AGC were showing their latest developments in high temperature, chemically resistant materials. It seems that interest in high performance plastics in oil and gas is only on the increase.

Finally, China had a huge presence at the show. There were so many exhibit booths from Chinese manufacturing companies that I lost count after about 100. They were showing products that were very much like the components and assemblies being sold by North American and European manufacturers, clearly with the aim of gaining share in this worldwide market.