Even with an unprecedented number of abstracts submitted this year, organizers of the 2014 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition promise a technical program that will favor quality over quantity.
This year’s ACE will be held April 6-9 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, and hosted by the Houston Geological Society and SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology).
It’s the 13th time AAPG will be traveling to Houston for its annual meeting, making it the most-visited location in Association annals (see accompanying box). ACE was most recently held in Houston in 2011.
“We were fortunate to receive a record number of abstracts, and I think the theme chairs felt like they really had a great number of abstracts from which to build technical sessions,” said technical program chair Gretchen Gillis, who is an upstream geological specialist with Aramco Services Company.
Gillis also was AAPG elected editor in 2007-10.
“I think we had about 1,450 abstracts,” she added. “It was really good to have so many good abstracts to choose from. Unfortunately, that means we rejected some good abstracts, but we really tried to make the strongest program we could.”
The theme for this year’s ACE will be “Ideas and Innovation: Fuel for the Energy Capital,” and it will feature more than 800 oral and poster presentations and more than 200 exhibitors.
Dave Rensink, general vice chair of ACE 2014, said unconventionals will be a major topic of discussion, but only as a reflection of current industry trends.
“Unconventionals seems to be driving a lot of the exploration these days. It’s not going to be dedicated to that subject, but unconventionals will have pretty good representation,” he said.
“On the whole, I’d say it’s a balanced program. I wouldn’t say that there’s a heavy emphasis on any particular topic,” concurred Gillis. “We’ve got the technical themes that most people think about when they think of AAPG: clastics, sediments, carbonates, unconventional reservoirs, conventional reservoirs, geophysics, environmental concerns, structural geology, geomechanics, basin modeling and geochemistry.”
“We have the standard themes, and I think the beauty of Houston is we have people coming from all over the world who are interested in attending,” she added, “and it makes for just a very strong program that will, I think, appeal to people everywhere.”
Changes of Note
Gillis said Houston is a recurring locale for the annual conference because of its centrality in the oil and gas industry, and this year’s conference will deliver all of the technical content and professional development AAPG members have come to expect from ACE.
There will, however, be a few minor changes from previous conferences.
“Because we had such strong submissions for the oral sessions, we decided to have all-day posters instead of half-day posters. That reduces the number of posters that you can accept, but it means that, for people who are trying to manage their time between the oral sessions and the poster sessions, it’s a little bit easier to have the option of seeing the posters all day,” Gillis explained.
“We have eight concurrent sessions, which is not unusual,” she continued. “We have a relatively low number of forums – we have a forum on Monday morning and one on Tuesday morning. We wanted to limit those sessions because we wanted to make sure that the scientific abstracts were the most important part of the program.
“We also have a ‘History of Petroleum Geology’ on Sunday,” she said, “and one of the things that is unusual is we have an entire day devoted to ‘Discovery Thinking.’ In previous years we only had a half-day.
“My expectation is that we will have a really great program,” Gillis said, “because we have a very large and dedicated committee here in Houston.”