OTC at 50: Bold Vision Led to Unimagined Success

Visionaries possess an extraordinary power to imagine what could be. Yet when a future unfolds that validates them, it may so exceed the original vision that even an extraordinary power of imagination is proved in adequate. The reality that happens vaults well beyond one’s wildest dreams. That could be said of the original decision by nine organizations in 1968 to launch the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston the following year.

The sponsors were optimistic enough to call it “the first annual conference,” and that vote of confidence has been powerfully affirmed. The conference that convenes on 30 April 2018 at Houston’s NRG Center will be the 50th OTC.  

The decision to organize the original conference was announced in a May 1968 JPT article by Joe Alford, executive secretary of SPE. “Nine of the leading engineering and scientific societies in the United States have taken a bold and significant step with the establishment of a new interdisciplinary meeting to be known as the Offshore Technology Conference,” he wrote. The initial conference was to be held 19–21 May 1969 in what was then the new downtown Houston Convention and Exhibit Center.

Major Forum

This excerpt from the article summarizes what the sponsors hoped to accomplish:

The new conference will provide a major forum of national importance and scope for the dissemination of technology related to offshore resources and environment. The total benefits and influence of the conference are now beyond prediction, but many knowledgeable persons feel that it will be of considerable value to the nation in our development of oceanography and resources from the oceans.

Yes, knowledgeable persons felt it would “be of considerable value to the nation.” But there was no intimation of what value the conference might have beyond the borders of the US or what interest it would generate internationally.

Hindsight tells us that OTC was an idea whose time had come, and clearly the organizers of the original believed that the time had come for something significant. But did they have any idea of how far-reaching the interest would prove? With participants from more than 100 countries? Of attendance that would breach 100,000 on several occasions? Of programs with well more than 40 sessions and 300 technical papers presented? Of 2,000 or more exhibitors with displays covering 600,000 square ft?