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Waleed Refaay, managing director, Society of Petroleum Engineers Middle East, North Africa and India
What role does the SPE play today?
SPE provides a worldwide forum for sharing technology, knowledge and the latest solutions for overcoming the technical challenges of finding and producing more oil and gas reserves.
SPE also helps address critical issues of the future such as sustainability and carbon capture. SPE members can access this global body of knowledge through SPE conferences and exhibitions, online resources including access to more than 80 000 technical papers, magazines, peer-reviewed journals, books, short courses and local section meetings.
A vital part of SPE’s mission is maintaining high professional standards by offering members continuing education options globally. SPE Petroleum Engineering Professional Certification offers an international credential recognising petroleum engineering expertise.
Has 2009 been a difficult year for the SPE?
Over the past year, SPE has responded to the global economic crisis that has significantly impacted the upstream oil and natural gas industry. In the midst of this downturn, members have been relying more than ever on SPE for global access to technical knowledge from world-class experts, networking opportunities and professional resources that help them solve problems and improve performance.
In 2009, SPE took many actions to mitigate the impact of the poor economy, while keeping the quality of our programmes high. These include moving events to major oil centres to reduce travel costs in response to company travel cutbacks. We added new online technical resources, and addressed the language and culture needs of members worldwide with locally specific solutions.
What are your hopes and expectations for 2010?
SPE continues to grow and add new members globally. We remain financially strong. Our focus is on providing the highest quality technical content and access to the latest technology that our members need in order to carry out their jobs better, wherever they are located, through the conferences, publications and online resources that we offer.
What trends have you seen in the market over the past year?
We believe that SPE has a unique position in providing technical content. We are pursuing opportunities to partner with other professional societies on events to offer more multidisciplinary content at our events and through joint exhibitions. We know our efforts to work more closely together on the operation of conferences will be appreciated by the petroleum industry in this region.
What challenges are you currently facing?
Our challenges are good ones – meeting the needs of a growing membership. SPE has had extraordinary growth globally. In addition, we have an increasing number of members age 35 and under. Preparing young people for careers in our industry remains an industry priority. SPE’s programmes help to accelerate the transition of these young members into careers by offering professional and technical skill development through workshops, publications, section networking groups and online mentoring.
We are also working to attract more young people to our profession through scholarships and other similar programmes.
