“Things keep staying the same and changing,” OTC chairman Ed Stokes told Upstream shortly before the opening of the show.
The huge exhibition floors are getting even bigger and now will cover around 700,000 square feet – enough to cover around 12 football fields.
That exhibition component remains one of Stokes’ favourite things about the show, even after attending OTC regularly for more than 30 years.
“I have been absolutely astounded by this equipment,” he said. “In a lot of other places it is models, but this is the real stuff – real BOP systems, real ROVs. Even as an engineer who works with this kind of stuff I’m spellbound.”
The technical programme, which spans seven concurrent sessions over the course of four full days, has benefitted from a record number of paper submissions, Stokes said.
“People typically think of large exhibitions,” when they think of OTC, Stokes said, “but what we are trying to do is a lot more than that.”
One of the biggest changes this year will be the addition of the D5 conference sessions held at the University of Houston and organised around the theme of “The Next Big Thing.”
To that end, the speakers list includes major players from fields as diverse as aerospace, game design, the military and 3D printing.
– Upstream