The Offshore Technology Conference in Houston each spring is a celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit of the oil patch.
Every scientific paper, every commercial exhibit at every OTC for the last 34 years started with someone saying at some point, "You know, if we can do this, we'll make money."
Because of the huge crowds at OTC each year, officials claim, with some justification, that even a small new exhibitor has an almost equal chance of being seen by the right person as the largest veteran vendor. But there may have been some you missed in the crowds over the years.
Risky venture
Back in the boom years of the late 1970s, one young woman had an outside exhibition where she demonstrated a new welding technique using gasoline in place of acetylene as a fuel. She freely admitted that her somewhat daunting procedure-which, she claimed, was not nearly as dangerous as it sounds-had no application to the offshore industry. Her targeted markets were Third World countries where gasoline was more readily available than acetylene, especially at remote locations.
Apparently her product was both marketable and survivable, as she kept coming to OTC year after year. When she quit coming in the mid-1980s, those who knew her hoped it was only her finances that had failed.
Star attraction
At least she had a product that was demonstrable, even if questionable. Not so with a Swedish firm that came to OTC in the late 1980s with some sort of "black box" device that allegedly would find hydrocarbon deposits via aircraft flyovers without the use of gravimetry, magnetometry, "sniffers," or special imaging.
A company executive refused to explain at a press conference what his device did or how. But he had a "secret weapon" that ensured a good turnout of reporters-his brother, actor Dolph Lundgren, fresh from his role as the Russian boxer who took on Sylvester Stallone in the 1985 film Rocky IV. The actor served as company spokesman-or nonspokesman, since he didn't say anything about the product, either.
Gorilla my dreams
Sometimes it's not so much what someone is selling as it is how he or she sells it. That certainly was the case when Rowan Cos. Inc. of Houston introduced its new Gorilla jack up rig at OTC in the early 1980s. It was a great concept for a new product, a heavy duty jack up designed to work in deeper waters and rough environments.
The problem, however, was that it was still only a concept at that time. Rowan officials didn't have a photograph, a blueprint, or even an artist's rendering of the proposed rig to show to prospective buyers at OTC.
So Rowan executives again demonstrated their knack for innovation. With no rig to show, they simply hired a group of long-legged models, dressed like Jungle Janes in brief animal-print swimsuits, to pose under a big "Gorilla" sign in the exhibit area.
The Gorilla rig may not have been at that OTC, but after 4 days of media and visitors lining up to snap photos of Rowan's models, its name was on everyone's lips.
Duck soup
On the other hand, an actual demonstration of a good product almost landed one OTC vendor in hot water one year.
It was a simple product, an absorbent material made from dried peat that floats on water, soaks up spilled petroleum, and is easily recovered afterward for safe extraction and disposal. It was the kind of thing that, once you see it on the market, you slap your forehead and exclaim, "I could have thought of that."
The vendor had a glass water tank into which he poured oil and then sprinkled peat to show how it attracted and absorbed the oil. But it was his demonstration of its environmental safety that got him in trouble.
After the peat trapped the oil and sank to the bottom, the vendor would put a baby duck in the water to show how safe and clean it was.
That little duck happily paddling through once-oily waters made a cute picture for roving TV cameramen. But when that film flashed on Houston TV screens during the evening news hour, it fired the ire of some who feared the little fowl was being foully treated.
By morning, the vendor was under court order to quit letting the little duck swim.
