There is something absolutely mesmerising about huge transient events. You go through the door and you're hit by the Tardis effect: this is reality, but it’s not really real. All the indicators suggest there’s substance here, but you know it’s ephemeral and will have vanished without trace within days.
Offshore Europe performs this role on a grand scale. Every two years, OE transforms and transfixes the city of
Aberdeen, drawing in exhibitors (more than 1,400 of them this year) and visitors (there were more than 40,000 of them in 2007) from across the planet. For four days, they take over the city’s conference and exhibition centre, and the city itself, to tell each other and us, their wider audience, about the ways and means that allow us to heat our homes and turn the keys in our cars.
We may be uncomfortable with this reality, ambivalent about our dependency, but the fact remains that we all of us rely on the oil and gas industry, and a day spent at Offshore Europe hammers this home better than just about anything. All the big players are there this week, in the ‘oil capital of Europe’: the multinationals whose names we all know ― like Shell, BP, Total, Halliburton ― and below them a whole hierarchy of supporting players whose names are not so familiar but whose reach is just as global and whose combined power, influence and wealth is colossal.
To outsiders just there to observe, the technology is astounding, incomprehensible, infinitely varied, and cocooned in a language entirely of its own. You catch snippets as you pass each stand, messages from a parallel universe of people dedicated to finding new ways, and refining old ways, of extracting energy from our shared planet. My world meshes with theirs from time to time, when my words take their message to their customers and beyond, to the media, and that’s why I was there this week, feet bleating from too much walking and standing about, head hurting from information overload and the uniquely energy-sapping atmosphere that accompanies any grand-scale expo.
I always come away from OE feeling ambivalent: I enjoy the buzz, boggle at the sheer scale and awesome ingenuity, and confess to hoovering up my share of freebies. But I look too at the waste ― all those plastic pockets for all those ID badges, all the lanyards they’re attached to, all those discarded brochures and guides and maps and leaflets and special daily editions of newspapers and energy publications, all those plastic cups and glasses, all those half-eaten finger buffets, all those thousands and thousands of corporate giveaways nobody actually wants or needs.
As I sat in a one-person-per-car traffic jam (yes, hands up, me too) waiting to leave, I began speculating. Will there be an Offshore Europe in, say, 2029? And if so, what will it look like? Will the Shells and BPs still be centre stage? Or will new players, led by innovators now still at school and college and university, have usurped them as we all make our painful shift from oil and gas to renewables, as shift we inevitably must? And will events such as this be long consigned to history, their place taken by virtual versions as part of a new mindset that stigmatises unnecessary travel and the waste of resources? Will the very notion of the corporate gift, say, be perceived as reckless and irresponsible in a new post-oil and gas reality?
Whatever, it seems to me inevitable that this biennial magnet for those who drive arguably the world’s most important industry will have undergone a seismic change within the next 20 years, and OE 29 ― if it exists at all ― will only very loosely resemble OE 09. Anyone care to speculate on exactly how?
Offshore Europe 2009 runs until 11 September at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre.
