As you read this, chances are that you are attending the 68th EAGE Conference & Exhibition in Vienna. Opportunities in Mature Areas – the theme of this year’s EAGE conference for Earth sciences and engineering – is important in a number of ways. Not least of which is to enhance and extend fields’ economic life to help ensure a long future for many oil provinces considered to be entering or past their prime. The conference promises to highlight new technical models, introduce leading edge technology and make available new technical skills and methods that will help developers to achieve these goals.

If you’re like us, you may feel that the Offshore Technology Conference – OTC, going strong since 1969 – has only just finished. And it was a big one, with a 24-year high attendance that reached 59,236 exploration and production professionals who converged to learn about the latest technology to find and produce oil and gas.

Before you know it, you (again, just like us) will be getting ready for this year’s ONS in Stavanger (we haven’t missed one since its beginning in 1974).

But this issue is not an in-between sort of thing. We’ve included a range of articles that should be of interest to anyone who’s attending EAGE, including subsea technology and floating production systems (FPSs) and floating production storage & offloading (FPSO) vessels, as well as a focus on geoscience topics such as seismic and visualisation technology.

In the subsea arena, we have an article from Oceaneering that is an overview of remote operated vehicle (ROV) operations, which have been a continually growing activity within the oil and gas industry worldwide, as well as in the North Sea.

Foster Findlay Associates (ffA) have contributed an article that explains how accurate and detailed 3D understanding of the subsurface from 3D seismic data IPA techniques is important, both in terms of information quality as well as access speed. The article also explains how the application of 3D IPA techniques in seismic interpretation has become a key part of mainstream interpretation workflow for many majors and E&P companies.

Continuing the seismic theme, Fugro-Jason has contributed an article that explains how seismic inversion transforms seismic reflection data into a quantitative rock property that can help describe a reservoir. Compared to seismic amplitudes, inversions show higher resolution and support more accurate interpretations, which facilitates better estimations of reservoir properties.

This issue also includes some of the results from The World Floating Production Report, soon to be published by energy industry analysts Douglas-Westwood, which indicate strong growth in FPS installations over the next five years. The article’s authors offer some of the thinking behind their views and findings in the upcoming report.

We also have a review of OTC, including a great many photographs taken at the conference. Take a look – you may see something you missed.

As we send this issue to press, we are also beginning along the road to ONS in August – an event we’d never take off our calendar.