The theme for the 2017 Annual Convention and Exhibition is “100 Years of Science Fueling 100 Years of Prosperity.” It is our intention to honor the past and look to the future.
The planning for next year’s celebration of AAPG’s 100th anniversary at ACE in Houston began more than 10 years ago by the 100th Anniversary Committee. The planning began in an environment of $90 to $100/barrel, and the execution will be in our current $40 to $50/barrel reality.
What to Expect at ACE 2017
Nonetheless, the committee will be showcasing two Discovery Thinking sessions, video interviews with prominent petroleum geoscientists, poster and digital displays of significant outcrops, and compilations of significant papers and past field trips.
Other committees are also planning significant programs for 2017. The Professional Women in Earth Sciences Committee will be honoring 100 years of women in petroleum geoscience with a program on Saturday and a historical timeline of the first 100 female Members of AAPG on display in the convention hall near the technical sessions.
The Energy Minerals Division and the Division of Environmental Geosciences are joining to present a symposium on Tuesday afternoon entitled “The Next 100 Years of Global Energy Use: Resources, Impacts and Economics.”
We plan to have a 100th anniversary gala celebration on Monday evening. This will entail a program highlighting our history, a talk by a noted authority and a dance band composed, at least in part, by geologists.
Our noted authority, Daniel Yergin, is about as noted as you can get in this business. Yergin is a leading expert on energy, geopolitics and the global economy, bestselling author, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is on the contact list of every energy corporation CEO and world leader with an interest in the energy business.
In addition, we will also provide a location for those of you who wish to talk over coffee away from the dance band.
We had more than 2,300 abstracts submitted, so as always, the technical program will be the premier event. That will never change.
Interaction and Synthesis
AAPG was started by a group of geologists in the early part of the 20th century who wanted to foster friendship and the exchange of data and ideas about petroleum geology.
I think a 1987 quote by Stephen Jay Gould from “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas” sums up what we are all about. “No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.”
We hope you are making plans to join us in Houston the first week in April 2017.