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00:00:00 Speaker 1
This episode of The Energy Pipeline is sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and Gas. Since the 1930s, Caterpillar's manufactured engines for drilling, production, well service, and gas compression. With more than 2, 100 dealer locations worldwide, Caterpillar offers customers a dedicated support team to assist with their premier power solutions.
00:00:26 Speaker 2
The Energy Pipeline is your lifeline to all things oil and gas, to drill down deep into the issues impacting our industry. From the frack site to the future of sustainability, hear more about industry issues, tools, and resources to streamline and modernize the future of oil and gas. Welcome to The Energy Pipeline.
00:00:49 Delfina Govia
Energy Pipeline audience, we are coming at you once again from the Gas Machinery Conference here in Phoenix, Arizona. I am your guest host for this episode, Delfina Govia, filling in for the fabulous Jordan Yates who could not be with us today, and her co- host, Lizzie Hurt. Lizzie, welcome.
00:01:09 Lizzie Hurt
Hey, Delfina.
00:01:10 Delfina Govia
Today, Lizzie and I are talking to Suzanne Ogle. Suzanne is the president and CEO of the Southern Gas Association, and she's the president of the Gas Machinery Research Council. Suzanne, thank you so much for joining us here on this show at your show.
00:01:29 Suzanne Ogle
Delfina, Lizzie, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here with you.
00:01:34 Lizzie Hurt
So to start us off, Suzanne, can you provide our listeners with an overview of three things, the Southern Gas Association, the Gas Machinery Research Council, and the Gas Machinery Conference, and how they all fit together?
00:01:45 Suzanne Ogle
Yeah, I love to say SGA, GMRC, and GMC, just to make sure that we get enough acronyms in there to confuse everything.
00:01:54 Delfina Govia
M-O-U-S-E.
00:01:54 Suzanne Ogle
Exactly. A, B, C, right? So Southern Gas Association is a trade association that represents the natural gas industry all the way from across in all the sectors. So exploration and production, all the way to distribution. Our members are across the entire United States, so California to Maine and in Canada as well, although the name Southern is slightly misleading when you are really a national organization. Been around since 1908, put together when the pipelines were going in, trying to make sure that the infrastructure should get in place so that United States had the energy that they needed, and they could work together faster if they shared knowledge and advanced the industry that way. So along the way, we have a number of committees, and one of our committees was the Pipeline Operations Committee, and they were interested in solving... They solve industry challenges. And so one of the challenges they were looking to solve was the pulsation from putting so many compressors in quickly, and they came up with working on a solution for the pulsation issues that was facing compression, and that then became the Gas Machinery Research Council. It was so successful, it spun off, and so Gas Machinery Research Council or the GMRC is an entity of SGA, and so that's where that came about. It's been around for 70 years or so, and so a product of people working together within the industry to solve industry challenges. And then the Gas Machinery Conference, which is the conference of GMRC, and it is the primary funding for the research that the Gas Machinery Research Council does, and that's been going on for nearly 50 years. I think it's more like 40- something but anyway. So it's where they get together, the research that they fund, the research presentations are done here, and then other technical updates and short courses to help the industry stay abreast of what they need to know and tone in on their expertise for the SMEs that they are.
00:03:54 Delfina Govia
So if I'm hearing you correctly, this show, what the sponsors pay, not just the sponsors, but the exhibitors that have booths here, the primary use of those funds is to go to fund research for GMRC?
00:04:13 Suzanne Ogle
Yep, yep, exactly. If you're an attendee, if you're a sponsor, if you are an exhibitor, anything that you do here, that money goes towards the research.
00:04:23 Delfina Govia
That's fantastic. So I've been going to trade shows for decades. I mean, it's part of the fabric of the oil industry. We go to trade shows, we go to conferences, and my opinion is they have a vital role within our industry. How do you see that? How do you see this particular event, GMC being able to contribute to the growth and the development of this industry, the oil and gas industry, and other industries? What do you think makes it so essential for professionals in their fields to attend this?
00:05:00 Suzanne Ogle
Well, I'll tell you, I come from both sides of the fence on this. So the first 30 years, well, first 20, 20, 25 years of my career was spent at a compression company. And so there were two startups that we did, and so in that role I also was an exhibitor at a conference, right? So I exhibited at the GMRC myself. So I spent that side, and what we wanted to do at that time was create awareness for the technology we had, the services that we had. And now on the other side of the fence, I also worked for an operator along the way and now I obviously run these organizations, but I think that one of the key parts of it is you don't know what you don't know until you go, and you will always learn something. As long as you're open to learning and you're here to absorb and be curious, you will learn something. I'll give you an example. I was making a note to myself. I was walking around with a friend of mine who's been in the industry for a long time. Earlier we were walking around the exhibit hall and she ran into... Actually, I stopped because they were giving away maple syrup, and I just recently bought maple syrup at the grocery store, I'm telling you, it's so expensive, I'm like, " I want some maple syrup." So I stopped to talk to them and she found out that they were their number one provider and she didn't know because she was in one role within the organization and the other operations role. So they're huge partners in what they do, and that connection wouldn't have been made had she not been walking around and we stopped and visited with people and gotten curious about what do you do, why are you here. So there's that aspect of it which develops relationships, but there's also the aspect of, listen, if you want to go in and you want to find out, hey, what's going on in emissions, you're going to go to a session on emissions and you're really going to get up to date. Or if you go to the research paper, you're going to find something that they're funding and that they have funded and what's the results of that research, is that going to help you, is it something you need to be considering in your business model or your approach to how you run your operations. So I think that it's really vital. You can get stuck in the silo within your own company, and I think that's one of the benefits of Southern Gas Association is that we go in across the entire sector. So the energy system works in unity. It doesn't work like EMP goes in one space and transmission goes in one pace. If you are shutting down a pipeline, you're going to impact something else. If you're shutting up production, you're going to impact something else. So supply, demand, transportation, it all goes together and you have to think about the system in its entirety, and being able to be at shows like this allows you to interact with people that have different perspectives than you, and I always think that that's going to be a benefit.
00:07:45 Lizzie Hurt
So I obviously we're hearing it, you keep talking about research, research. GMC is known for its technical training and presentations. We've seen that here already. Can you share some insights into the kinds of educational sessions and presentations that attendees can participate in?
00:08:01 Suzanne Ogle
Sure. I think I would say it's evolved over a period of time. There's always been the technical presentations and what's going to make your operations good today and what do you need to be thinking about tomorrow, what's coming down the pipe with regulations and how's that going to impact you. But also recently as we've been funding our research, we have two different ways that we look at it when we're selecting research, and so we take a portion of it and we take that that's strategic research. So whether that's looking at hydrogen, so for example, we just got funding from the DOE for hydrogen research on what's that impact for compression station going to be, what's hydrogen going to look like there. So that's something that's kind of coming down the pipe. We need to evaluate what are the unintended consequences, what are the learnings that we can do from that. So we have some strategic reaches goes into the strategic budget, and then we also have research that goes into you're going to improve operations now, you're going to walk away with something you can go implement immediately. Both parts of that have to come together to be able to make a company viable for the long term. So planning a conference like this takes an enormous amount of work and energy, and we have a lot of moving parts that go into it. GMRC has a committee that is the conference planning committee, and in January they go out and solicit papers and research and everybody turns in... We probably got I think 178 submissions. They go through and they decide what are the most relevant. So nothing can be commercialized. I mean, in your research presentation or your paper or your short course, you're here to learn. You're not here to sell a product in that situation. So anything that you're doing, we love to see operators and vendors come together to say, " Here's the solution that we provided and this was the impact operationally." But so the planning committee goes through all of the different papers and they pick what are the best papers, and they rank them and pick the ones that are going to be most relevant. I was talking to somebody today, somebody I worked with eons ago, and I said, " How do you feel about the conference? How's it going for you?" He said, " My gosh, the presentations have been so useful. I sat in this one, I brought my son, and we divide and conquer, and then we come back and talk together about what we saw," so that they could cover. He says, " There's so many different ones at the same time that are relevant." So I think that goes to show you that the planning committee's doing their job. They spend a lot of time really honing in on what is going to be most impactful for the attendees.
00:10:36 Lizzie Hurt
That's awesome. Looking at the schedule, there's a lot of things-
00:10:39 Suzanne Ogle
A lot.
00:10:39 Lizzie Hurt
...that sound interesting that are all at the same time. How do you choose?
00:10:43 Suzanne Ogle
Yeah. Well, it's hard when you have only so many sessions available and you have that many submissions you have to go through, and you only get the best of the best which is probably why I think we're at a thousand attendees right now.
00:10:54 Lizzie Hurt
Wow.
00:10:54 Suzanne Ogle
So that's why they're drawing them in, and we had people come in from Africa, we had people come from India. I mean, they come from a long way to come to this.
00:11:05 Delfina Govia
Wow. You guys definitely have expanded reach over the decades.
00:11:09 Suzanne Ogle
Yeah, yeah.
00:11:10 Delfina Govia
So I was noticing a different sort of topic discussion that is coming up. It was actually delivered by your keynote speaker yesterday morning.
00:11:26 Suzanne Ogle
Robert Bryce?
00:11:26 Delfina Govia
Robert Bryce, yes, on the energy transition.
00:11:30 Suzanne Ogle
So I'd like to say something.
00:11:31 Delfina Govia
Please.
00:11:32 Suzanne Ogle
Please never use the word transition. I hate that word. It's evolution. Transition means to go away from one thing to another. We are evolving as we've been evolving since energy came about.
00:11:43 Delfina Govia
Can I just reach over and hug her right now?
00:11:46 Suzanne Ogle
We might make a noise. Yeah, so he used the word transition, but it's something that I really feel passionate about because I think we're doing a disservice to the general public when they come from the... They know so little about energy and what's going on so when someone says it's transitioning, it's going away, they believe you. It's not. And so that is an agenda that is done by groups that want it to go away.
00:12:11 Delfina Govia
Exactly. They do want it to go away, and we battle that every single day in the oil industry.
00:12:17 Suzanne Ogle
Well, I don't know if you saw earlier, so we have the SuitUp is a group that I've been working with. It's a nonprofit. They go into schools around communities all over the United States, and they bring in kids from disadvantaged and give them opportunities to interact with professionals because so that way they can see different visions of what careers look like. And so I asked them to bring their kids over here from the Phoenix area. So they brought the kids today, and what my staff had actually set them up and to go into a class called Analysis of an Engine Failure. So I'm like, " Listen, we want to bring them into the industry. We don't want to run them out of the industry." So I went and I brought them up to the tech area, and I did a presentation on, which was a abbreviated presentation of something that I teach for SGA, it's called Introductions to the Natural Gas Industry. And so I gave them an overview, an understanding of energy, and they learned a lot. They learned about LNG, they learned about how much we need, they learned about energy rejected. They learned about all the things that they're not teaching in school. And so when we think about how energy works and how natural gas fits into it, not only does it fits in as a just- in- time fuel that's going to supply a power generation, but it also fits in on a longer term basis with CCUS and other options that are actually going to remove carbon. So that's why you're not going to get rid of fossil fuels because you can use them to your advantage. I told them we don't have a fuel problem, we have an emissions problem, and we need to reduce emissions. We don't need to pick one fuel over the other. We need to use all of them and synchronized to make the lowest emissions possible to provide the greatest energy.
00:13:56 Delfina Govia
So clean and sustainable fuels, renewable fuels, it's all something that is becoming more and more part of the discussions in the energy industry. How are you seeing conferences like GMC supporting that conversation?
00:14:16 Suzanne Ogle
Well, I think they're bringing... Well, so Robert's speech, I like Robert a lot. I think number one, he's a great guy, but I think everybody needs to be reminded of some facts that you can use. And so one of the industry issues I have is that we try to bring in people with facts, and that doesn't always work. You have to connect hearts and minds. And so I can give you an example about that is my father in my own family, and I'm sure everybody has people within their families who have opinions about energy, but he is a consumer of propane. So he lives in Florida, doesn't have natural gas service to his house, has a propane pool heater, has a propane generator, they just remodeled their kitchen, have a propane kitchen, and he is fearful about natural gas and oil, believes that they might be doing damage to the environment that can't be undone. And so you have to, number one, understand where they're coming from first, and so it's a fear for him, right? So he doesn't know. It's an unknown because he doesn't have enough information, and he hears the mainstream news media with all the sensational and catastrophic consequences that they talk about, and he doesn't have enough information. So I talk to him all the time and I say, " Number one, the policies that you vote for will limit your access to propane, and let me just tell you what Phyllis is going to look like when she doesn't..." It's my dad's wife, right? " I'm going to tell you she wants her power. So you better make sure that you fill up that generator and support policies that allow you to continue to have propane at your house." But I think unless we're having these conversations, and you get some of that here at the conference. So that's on a bigger picture, how do you look at something from a 360 point of view. You get technical expertise and knowledge that you can bring back. You're having peer- to- peer conversations that are more informal. Listen, I was running my station the other day, my witch's hat keeps filling up, like, " What's going on with that?" And you're like, " Hey, this is what we did to solve that problem." So informal conversations that really help you do your job well, and I think you need to have all of that working together to really be an advocate for the industry, to be good at your job, and to be thinking forward about how these companies are going to be successful in the long run.
00:16:32 Delfina Govia
You touched on this earlier. I think that we have got to bring this education not just more broadly within society, but more deeply in society all the way into the schools with our children.
00:16:49 Suzanne Ogle
A hundred percent. It needs to start early, and these are people that vote and they need to be informed on policy. The fact of the matter is the energy industry is very complicated. I mean, to be honest, some of the people in our own industry don't understand it, and so how are you going to get out to a general public that gets soundbites?
00:17:07 Delfina Govia
That's right.
00:17:07 Suzanne Ogle
And they don't really want more than a soundbite. That's what the consumption looks like nowadays. And so you have to start early and not be having any source of energy vilified. I'm not going to vilify renewables and I'm not going to vilify oil and gas. I'm going to say, " You need to be agnostic to your energy source. You need to be thinking about density. You need to be thinking about efficiency. You need to be thinking about availability, and you need to be thinking about affordability, and all these things have to work together, and you have to start talking about this at a younger age." And so I asked all those kids today, " Did you learn something?" All of them raised their hands. I said, " Anybody learn something that you didn't you teach in school?" All of them had their hands up because what they're teaching in school isn't a balanced perspective.
00:17:55 Delfina Govia
Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's an organization that I've actually had on my podcast that it's called CELF, Children's Environmental Learning Foundation, and what they do is this organization goes into schools K through 12, and they provide training to the teachers on how to do hands- on training experiments with the children that's data- driven, it's scientific. It's not just saying a whole bunch of propaganda soundbites or whatever and having the children run home and be scared that the planet is going to disappear. It's actually giving the children some real scientific knowledge, training and ability to come to their own conclusions and to learn something.
00:18:46 Suzanne Ogle
Well, and the kids need to understand how much energy your cell phone takes. Is anybody willing to give up their cell phone? I don't think so.
00:18:53 Delfina Govia
Ah, that's a good one. That's a good one.
00:18:55 Lizzie Hurt
There's a lot of things people won't give up.
00:18:58 Suzanne Ogle
Well, and I mean that's really the crux of it. We have a quality of life that we like, and the thing is is if we can think strategically about how to use energy and in carbon neutral or carbon negative ways, we can have the quality of life that we enjoy. We can help others enjoy a quality of life. This isn't a United States issue or it's not an India issue. It's a global issue because we all live in one atmosphere. So really, frankly, what the United States does is going to be minimus in what the impact is for the world. So it's going to be incumbent upon us to help share learnings, share technologies, give access to resources like our LNG to help bring the emissions down globally because people want a good life and they're not going to sacrifice. You need to look at China's building coal plants, Japan's building coal plants, everybody's building coal plants, and I'm not even saying coal's bad, but you got to put carbon capture on it. You got to do something that makes the emissions not be part of what you're doing. So I think you have to think strategically about the amount of energy you need where you have an increasing demand for energy, and then you got to use all these technologies including direct capture and carbon capture and natural gas and all these ways that you can make the energy that people need in a lower emissions way.
00:20:18 Delfina Govia
Are you finding that walking around a conference like this, talking to people at a conference like this, are you finding that there is a greater sense of collaboration amongst organizations to be innovative to solve some of these challenges?
00:20:38 Suzanne Ogle
I think it's a great question because going forward, there are going to be partners that were not previously partners in order to do this together.
00:20:46 Delfina Govia
Ah, yeah. Okay.
00:20:47 Suzanne Ogle
So if you're looking at a point source, they're going to need compression and those two might not have done so. It's going to be how do you come to business terms and business models that make sense going forward where these people had not previously worked together and now they need to work together to make a thing. So I think the more that you establish relations, I believe in networking, a hundred percent. My career was built on the people that I know.
00:21:10 Delfina Govia
So what you just said, what you just did was you explained why this is an energy evolution and not an energy transition.
00:21:20 Suzanne Ogle
Okay, good. I'm glad I clarified.
00:21:23 Delfina Govia
You just showcased that for us right here live. It's about we're not transitioning, we're evolving in the way that we innovate, that we build business models, play together, solve problems.
00:21:36 Suzanne Ogle
We're the most equipped people to evolve. The energy industry has been evolving since we started. I mean, we started with lights down the street, for heaven's sake, and now we're powering plants and shipping LNG to other countries. I mean, this is a innovative group of people. We're experts at what we do. We understand how the systems work. I mean, this is the right people to be helping evolve. We want new, bright minds come in too. Bring ideas, bring your best people here. If you want technology, you want ideas, you want to make a difference, all these kids that want to condemn or bash fossil fuels or object to them, if you got such great, come over here. We want you to come on in and be part of it.
00:22:23 Lizzie Hurt
So in your experience and going off, this is going to jump into this next question, but what are some of the standout success stories related to GMC that highlight how important this conference is? Are there any success stories or parts of the conference you want to talk about with respect to the sustainability and the energy?
00:22:43 Suzanne Ogle
Well, I mean, I can tell you where we started from with the pulsation, it was GMRC that solved the pulsation issue, just a non- issue. Metering has been resolved in a way that has been really impactful along the way, and that was kind of through SGA but also through GMRC. But at this conference, I think people coming together and getting that information is going to go back and have operations in ways we won't have visibility of here. But it goes back, it helps them. They know all those stories about what they learned here and took back and how they changed operations to be able to be more effective. But also just some of the new ideas that we're bringing forward and helping understand what does the impact of hydrogen look like, what does the renewable natural gas look like, what are these things, and so they're able to share. I mean, anytime that you want to scale learning to bring a group of people together that are working on the same thing, you're going to have scaled impact because you share those lessons learned and you don't have to create it over and over the same thing, right? Nobody has to go through this. Ideally, that's what you want your teenager to do, right? Learn from your lessons along the way.
00:23:49 Delfina Govia
Absolutely. Absolutely.
00:23:50 Suzanne Ogle
So if we could look at everybody like teenagers and say, " Here, we got all this that we've learned, let us help you. What can we learn from you?"
00:23:57 Delfina Govia
Exactly. Okay. Sorry.
00:23:59 Lizzie Hurt
So we haven't talked about this yet, but safety is obviously something that's very important in the oil and gas industry. Are there any safety related conversations that are happening here?
00:24:12 Suzanne Ogle
Well, I think the safety's integral to anything that you do. So whether you're talking about emissions or whether you're talking about whatever that topic is that we're doing, what I mentioned earlier, that they were going to take the kids to a root analysis of failure, all those involve safety and learnings that are going to make sure that this industry is safe, and it's really our license to operate. You have to be safe, and you can see everybody operates that way. It's funny because, I'm going to give you a story, is this morning I was crossing the street to come over to the conference from the hotel, and there was that red hand up, and there was a guy starting to go across the street, and I said, " It's not green." And he's like, " Is that a big deal here?" I go, " It's a big deal everywhere because you're not safe. You got to be safe." If you look in this industry, it's one of the primary things that we pay attention to because safety involves following procedures, but also understanding and not taking risks. And so when you're crossing the street, even if you look and you see that it looks, somebody can come around the corner or something. So we have to, and we do, operate in a way that minimizes risks and that makes all the people go home at night to the best of our ability. I don't think it's just something that's written on a paper. I think it's a mandate that we live. You want people to go home. We think about operations always. We have pipeline safety management systems where we try to operationalize safety into the field so that you're making decisions based on best practices and learning so that everybody can be as safe as they can be.
00:25:47 Delfina Govia
Okay. Suzanne, what's the biggest hurdle facing us going forward?
00:25:57 Suzanne Ogle
Well, I think the biggest hurdle facing us is keeping people excited about the industry. And so that's also a thing I think this conference brings to you. You get around people who believe and you can get fired up. So if you're out in a way where you're not interacting, and listen, I think this is part of remote. So people are working remote a lot. They live in their little isolated house. They don't get to go into the office like they used to a lot. You can get consumed in your mind, and you hear a lot of news about it's going away, going away, going away, and you can hear and you get with all these people that are passionate. This is not the end of the industry. It is the best time to be in the industry. This is when you can make... I always tell people I hate to clean a clean house. I don't want to do it. It's just boring. I need a dirty house. Let me clean it. Let me see a difference. That's where we are, right? We have brought the world this far, and we can bring them farther, and that when you get together with people that are excited and passionate, there's no better way to keep the industry moving with momentum is to bring people together who are excited about it, and I think that's one of the best benefits.
00:27:05 Delfina Govia
So let's wrap this up with a question. Oh, first of all, before I ask you my last question-
00:27:12 Suzanne Ogle
The question before the question.
00:27:13 Delfina Govia
The question before the question. Didn't I see recently that you published a white paper?
00:27:19 Suzanne Ogle
I did. So it's called Grit for the Grid.
00:27:23 Delfina Govia
Grit for the Grid.
00:27:24 Suzanne Ogle
Grit, G- R- I- T, for the Grid.
00:27:27 Delfina Govia
Okay.
00:27:28 Suzanne Ogle
I wrote it not for industry people, but for ordinary people because I think they need to understand all the different scenarios that go into it. So it's not highly technical, or if you're in the industry, you're going to go, " Okay, I know that," but I'm writing it for the more of the general public, and then I have just a bunch of points that support it. But I really want people that aren't really operationally focused or technically focused, say they're in our finance departments, say they're in our marketing departments, say they're the father of your marketing person, I want people to know some questions they should be answering. So when the unicorns and the rainbows are presented by the Sierra Club, we could say, " Hey, what about this?" and ask a question that's relevant and let them come back to you with an answer so that we're asking the right things.
00:28:14 Delfina Govia
Lizzie, let's get our hands on a copy of that. Is there an electronic copy or a link that we could get, Suzanne?
00:28:19 Suzanne Ogle
Absolutely. Send it to you and you can go... I think it's electronically, so you can flip through it. You can download it if you feel like wasting the paper, and otherwise you read it online.
00:28:28 Delfina Govia
What do you think, Lizzie? Let's put that in the show notes.
00:28:30 Lizzie Hurt
Absolutely. Let's do it.
00:28:31 Delfina Govia
Give people a link. All right, let's hit her with our last question. I'm a fan of trade shows. I love coming to these conferences for the reasons that you say, you learn so much here, you get to interact. What is your advice to professionals who are looking to engage at trade shows? How can they make the most of their time here?
00:28:54 Lizzie Hurt
I'm curious your perspective on how the youngest generation views trade shows also.
00:29:00 Delfina Govia
Ooh. Yeah, not just us old folks, but how the... Yeah, great question, Lizzie.
00:29:04 Suzanne Ogle
Yeah. So I think the young kids, they're so longing to get together. As a matter of fact, I mentor people, and I had a call from somebody the other day, a graduate of a Ivy League college, came to work in the industry remotely, and they were longing for interaction. They were trying to move on to where they could actually be with people. So this is a great venue to be able to meet people if you're young, to see what's going on, to pick up some of the energy, to have those conversations. If you're old, like you and me-
00:29:37 Delfina Govia
That's right. I know.
00:29:39 Suzanne Ogle
Right? I think they're a great opportunity to see people. I mean, I am a hugger, so I'm like, I'm always, " Oh my god, I'm so glad to see you. I can't wait to hug you," because these people have been important in my career and in my life and I'm so happy when I see them. So it's not only seeing old people that I know and seeing what they're up to, what are they doing, what are they thinking, but it's meeting new people. And so I think my advice to people is you got to get curious. And so one of the things, I was in sales for a long time, and if you are an exhibitor, do not sit in your booth in your chair on your phone. Stand up and meet people. That's what you're here for, right? If you're an attendee, don't just go talk to the people you know. Stop and ask me, tell me something, go find someone you don't know what they do and ask them about it. I was talking to somebody today, he did air. I'm like, " Listen, we have a technical conference on environmental and permitting. It has a whole air track. It's going to be in Orlando in February. I think it's a great avenue for you." So there are a lot of synergies where you can pick up and get information in lots of ways. I am a lifelong learner, consumer of information. So the more knowledge I could get, the better. It makes my heart happy and my brain stay alive.
00:30:51 Delfina Govia
So can I just point something out here as you were talking and Lizzie asked the question about young professionals? As soon as she asked that, I started looking around the room here, and you just don't see those young faces, and I think maybe, Suzanne, that the reason for that is that when these conferences come up, certain people get picked to go.
00:31:16 Suzanne Ogle
A hundred percent.
00:31:17 Delfina Govia
So maybe one of the things that we could do with this show is to implore our listeners who may be the ones that have some say in who gets to go to a conference is to tap the younger generations on the shoulder and say, " Go."
00:31:34 Suzanne Ogle
I think so. And I think there's such a cost consciousness in how do you spend your money, where your travel go, is it an advantage to send them, what are they going to get out of it, oh, is it a boondoggle, and it's not. But that's very controllable. Ask them to come back and report to you what did they learn, where did you go, what's something new that you learned. They'll probably when they report back, you'll learn something that they learned that you didn't know, right? I mean, so it's a way to amplify learning, and you can hold people accountable and to a standard that is a beneficial for them and a beneficial for your company.
00:32:11 Delfina Govia
And they're going to look at things through a different lens.
00:32:15 Suzanne Ogle
They're going to also believe you're investing in them.
00:32:17 Delfina Govia
Ah, yes, yes. Do you agree, Lizzie?
00:32:20 Lizzie Hurt
Yes, absolutely.
00:32:21 Delfina Govia
Well, Suzanne, this was a pleasure. Lizzie, any additional questions for Suzanne? I thought this was fantastic.
00:32:26 Lizzie Hurt
No, this was a great conversation. Thanks for joining us.
00:32:28 Suzanne Ogle
Yeah, thanks for inviting me. It's nice. Love to be able to talk to you. I appreciate it very much.
00:32:33 Delfina Govia
Wonderful. And thank you for having this show so that we could do our show.
00:32:36 Suzanne Ogle
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:38 Speaker 2
Come back next week for another episode of The Energy Pipeline, a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. To learn more, go to oggn. com
