Australian Energy Producers will hold its annual conference and exhibition at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre, on Mounts Bay Road, running from the seventeenth to the twentieth of May in the year after next.
The event is the principal gathering of Australia's oil and gas industry and the successor to the conference long run under the APPEA name. The organiser expects more than two thousand attendees from Australia and abroad, a figure attributed on its own conference pages to Samantha McCulloch, the chief executive of Australian Energy Producers. Exhibitor testimonials published alongside the programme come from bp, Shell Australia and Tri-Star, which indicates the tier of company taking floor space.
Why the timing matters
Western Australia is the centre of the country's liquefied natural gas industry, and Perth is where the operating and commercial leadership of that industry is based. A conference held there is a domestic industry gathering in a way that an east coast event is not, and the attendance of state and federal energy ministers has historically made it a venue for policy signalling as much as for commercial meetings.
The sector is working through a set of questions that do not resolve on a conference timetable: the investment case for new upstream capacity against long run demand uncertainty, the domestic gas reservation debate in Western Australia, and the regulatory treatment of emissions from existing facilities. Those are board questions rather than operating ones, which is what gives the event its seniority of attendance.
What has not been published yet
The organiser has not released a conference theme or a speaker programme, and the call for papers guidelines were issued earlier. Registration details had not been published at the time of writing.
Executives planning travel should note that the venue sits in the Perth central business district on the Swan River foreshore, within walking distance of the main hotel stock, which removes the transfer logistics that attach to a number of comparable events.
