• PESGB Geo-Horizon 2020, Hamish Wilson, PESGB President 2015
• Canada Oil Sands – Setting the Floor for Oil Prices
• Will Chad Join The Top 10 African Oil Producing Nations?

Plus Much More Inside

PESGB Geo-Horizon 2020

The PESGB looks to the next five years and plans how best to achieve ambitious targets on behalf of the membership

It was a great pleasure to host a very successful Stoneley Lecture this month. Sir Tony Robinson and Dougal Jerram gave a very interesting and entertaining presentation on volcanoes and the link with continental drift. They worked very well together with Sir Tony giving a social and historical perspective weaving in the Dougal’s geoscience explanations. It will be a hard act to follow. Our challenge will be to continue to make sure we broaden our audience to the general public rather than essentially a PESGB community.

At our last council meeting we held a PESGB strategy session. The genesis of the idea, to look at what we are doing and how we serve our members and charitable objectives, came out of wide ranging discussions and challenges from members and staff. These suggested that we needed to review the purpose of the PESGB. So we devoted the last council meeting to this topic. We had a stimulating discussion with the council, office staff and some externals. The results of the meeting will be presented in full in the monthly magazine. Here are the highlights.

We discussed ‘the purpose of the PESGB’ and specifically addressed what services we provide to our members that make us distinctive from The Geological Society and AAPG and other relevant societies (SPE, EAGE, SEG, etc). Here are the key points that we consider distinctive about the PESGB:

1. The PESGB exists for its members;
2. The technical programme is focused on the E&P business;
3. The PESGB has a strong networking and social programme;
4. The membership directory adds to a sense of community;
5. The PESGB maintains a low cost programme of events and conferences for its membership, the industry, and the public.

An important aspect of our discussion was the relationship between our charitable objectives (To promote for the public benefit, education in…) and providing services to members. The PESGB distributes substantial sums of money into geoscience education and the MSc programme. Yet, our council and office staff are focused almost entirely on running events and providing services to members. Thus, there is a concern that we could be more effective in how we manage these disbursements and perhaps look to setting some target outcomes for our funding.

We discussed what the PESGB might look like in five years. An extensive list of ideas and issues were brainstormed of which the following are a selection:

1. Managing membership levels. This is a very powerful objective that keeps a focus on membership services.
2. How we manage our charitable disbursements and the objectives for those disbursements. The MSc funding programme provoked a lot of debate with a consensus that it should be maintained at some level.
3. How we reflect the changing nature of our membership as the North Sea transitions to a more international focused membership and as the long term sustainability of unlimited hydrocarbon exploitation is brought increasingly into question.
4. The internet and social media is a massive influence on our businesses. Clearly the PESGB has to move with the times with our online services.

In summary, a profound discussion with some important ideas and a very pleasing sense of consensus among the participants. Over the coming months we will be crystallising these ideas into a plan for the PESGB which we will share and discuss. If you have any comments or suggestions on these ideas please contact the office.

We will be using the thoughts from this discussion to help frame a questionnaire which will be sent to all members asking their views on the society and the services we provide. This should be coming out in May.

In conclusion, at council we continue to debate how we respond to an industry under pressure. We have three key events this year (DEVEX, The Africa Conference, and PGC8). All have strong technical programmes with a fair degree of sponsorship income. I urge members to support these low cost events and to continue to invest in your own education.