The second annual Oil & Gas Maintenance Technology North America conference and exhibition, presented by OGJ parent company PennWell, took place in New Orleans Aug. 31-Sept. 2.
As director of the conference, this editor had the assistance of a resourceful advisory board to put together a program of presentations on the technologies and techniques needed to achieve excellence in maintenance and reliability in upstream, midstream, and downstream oil and gas operations.
The Maintenance Techniques & Technology track featured sessions covering failure prevention and analysis, management best practices, state-of-the-art technologies, and asset management.
Added to the conference this year was a second track called Safety & Asset Integrity. This track's sessions covered the topics of process safety and asset integrity management systems.
Key takeaways from the conference were not just the tools and techniques presented, but also the cultural concepts necessary for operations and maintenance professionals to reach their goals.
Opening keynote
The opening keynote session was kicked off by a presentation from John S. Mitchell, a former site manager at a large petrochemical complex and former vice-president of maintenance operations and engineering with ABB Inc.
Mitchell talked about how in today's highly competitive and regulated industrial workplace, sustainable success requires looking beyond maintenance excellence toward a company's overall business and operational excellence.
Next, delegates heard a summary of the outlook for supply and demand of liquid fuels and natural gas from Michael Schaal, the director of the US Energy Information Administration's oil and gas division.
Schaal provided a look at his forecast to 2035, which showed that onshore oil production from the US Lower 48, especially oil shale from the Bakken play in the Williston basin, will replace and reverse declining conventional US oil production.
Deborah Grubbe, PE, the final speaker in the opening keynote session, has held engineering, operations, and safety roles in the process industries, mostly with DuPont, and she is currently a consultant with DuPont Safety Resources.
Grubbe focused on how a company can use its safety leadership and its culture to its advantage, and she talked about hazards around people as well as the importance of consistency in an organization, noting that what an organization is looking for from its employees is consistency.
The closing keynote
The conference's closing session offered insights that could benefit any organization, not just those in oil and gas production, processing, and transportation.
Delegates were treated to a presentation by Jon Katzenbach, who was a consultant with McKinsey & Co. for more than 35 years and now heads up the Katzenbach Center for Organizational Innovation, a part of Booz & Co.
Katzenbach's speech also focused on culture within organizations and the importance of using the culture rather than blaming the culture when there are problems in the workplace. He outlined the benefits of using both formal and informal elements as levers to change behavior.
The formal elements, which include updating training and providing incentives, align employees, while the informal elements, which affect behavior changes, work to motivate employees. These informal elements include enabling self improvement, cultivating accountability, and building engagement with the organization.
A motivator makes a rational and an emotional connection with people, Katzenbach said. He called these motivators, who make people feel good about and understand the importance of the work they must do, "cells of insight and energy."
Katzenbach said an organization cannot fix a broken or bad culture by working on it directly. Instead, it is necessary to work with the culture that is there, to balance rational and emotional elements to work with employees, and to find and exploit the cells of energy and insight that are already present.
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