Tools for Making Effective Presentations About Energy

Robert W. Chase, Chair and Benedum Professor of Petroleum Engineering, Marietta College, and member, SPE Energy Information Committee

It’s a typical Monday morning: Your in-basket is overflowing, you have three meetings to get ready for today, a budget presentation to make on Thursday, and then it happens—the dreaded phone call. “Hi, this is John Smith, and I’m calling on behalf of the local Kiwanis Club. I wondered if you would be able to give a talk this Friday at noon on the oil and gas industry and why gasoline prices are so high.”

You stall for time. You want to do it, but you would have to contact the boss to get permission, see if there are any corporate presentations that you could use, or worse yet, have to surf the Web to find fresh, relevant data and put your own PowerPoint talk together. Reluctantly, you reply that there is no way you can get a talk ready in time and decline the offer even though you really were looking forward to that free baked steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans.

This scenario repeats itself all too often in our industry. That is why SPE is making a special effort to help out anyone who ends up in that dilemma. In 2006, the SPE Board of Directors established the Energy Information Committee and set forth several goals for the committee. One important goal was to establish a database consisting of presentations that could be used by the membership and of general energy information for dissemination to the general public. This directive stemmed from SPE’s Long Range Plan that has a section focusing on “Industry Image” that provides guidance on SPE’s longer-term vision on energy education.

As part of that directive, we set out to update and repackage SPE Energy Resources on the SPE.org website. We had three objectives:

Compile a database of presentations that members of our society could use to make presentations for organizations ranging from elementary schools to the Kiwanis Club.
Make it easy for students, teachers, and parents to find information about oil and gas and other energy sources in our daily lives.
Make it easy for students to find career information about the energy industry, especially the oil and gas industry.

For many years, SPE has maintained a website containing a slide library that provides building blocks for presentations as well as a few presentation packages. The new database contains presentations such as: “Who wants to be an Oil and Gas Millionaire?” based on the recent hit TV show (ideal for grades 4–8, just make sure you take prizes with you!); “Energy Resources: Can We Survive the Perfect Storm?” (perfect for a luncheon talk at Kiwanis). Also present are sets of slides on various energy and energy-related subjects that can be picked through to create a unique and targeted presentation. SPE also has a presentation you can use for students in grades 6–12 called “Petroleum Engineers Make a World of Difference,” with some fun animations. A new elementary school presentation has been added as well, titled, “Energy: How It Makes Our Lives Easier,” which also has animation.

The Energy Information Committee has gathered several such presentations and put them on www.spe.org for easy access by the membership. They will be added to the new www.energy4me.org energy information website that we expect to launch later this year. At the same time, we invite you to submit presentations you have made for inclusion on the site as well. If you have a PowerPoint presentation you would like to share, simply send it to energyed@spe.og. It will be reviewed by the SPE staff and placed on the website. We plan to continue to improve the material that exists on the site now by adding notes to the PowerPoints for future presenters (please do the same on any that you submit as well).

In addition, the Energy Information Committee has created an Ambassador Lecturer program to make presentations to more specialized audiences, such as teachers, the news media, and government agencies where in-depth questions about the industry are likely to be asked. Members have already made several presentations to these audiences, and their talks are available on the website.

You can also check out the SPE website to find references for, and links to, current energy information and statistics from groups such as the US. Dept. of Energy’s Energy Information Agency and the American Petroleum Inst., as well as several major oil companies that make statistics and energy information available to the general public.

Ultimately we want to promote student and teacher access to the rest of the material on the SPE website. We, the members, must be proactive in promoting this interaction, and the best way to do that is to get out there and talk to students, teachers, clubs, and organizations about what we know better than anybody else—our oil and gas industry.

If you have any questions about how to access a presentation or how to submit one, please contact Margaret Watson at mwatson@spe.org. Enjoy your baked steak!

New Online Library Launched

A new online library that allows users to search for and purchase documents from multiple societies in a single transaction is now available. Participants in the OnePetro library include SPE, the American Rock Mechanics Association, NACE International, the Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts, and the World Petroleum Council. OnePetro represents the first online availability of American Rock Mechanics and World Petroleum Council documents. The library can be accessed at www.onepetro.org. and currently contains more than 60,000 documents.

The SPE Foundation supported the development of OnePetro, which is expected to continue to grow as new organizations join. The Foundation got the idea for OnePetro when it was raising money to support SPE’s website, www.spe.org, and heard repeatedly from companies and members the desire for a central depository of the industry’s literature.

Several SPE members were recognized during the Regional Awards Luncheon in March at the SPE Middle East Oil and Gas Show in Bahrain. Pictured in the front row, from left, are Khalid H. Al-Saif, winner of the Regional Management and Information Award; Sami El-Halfawi, Regional Drilling and Completion Award; Mousa Al-Eid, Regional Projects, Facilities, and Construction Award; Ahmad Saqr Al Suwaidi, Regional Service Award; Badria Farhad, Regional Service Award; Hosnia Hashim, Regional Reservoir Description and Dynamics Award; and Omar Y. Mohamed, Regional Production and Operations Award. Pictured in the back row, from left, are 2007 SPE President Abdul-Jaleel Al-Khalifa; Ali Al-Hasan, SPE Director Middle East Region; 2003 SPE President Andrew Young; former SPE Director Middle East Region, Hussein Shehab; and SPE Executive Director Mark Rubin.