Global Energy Leaders Gather In Houston For CERAWeek

Each year, the city of Houston serves as host for some of the most important and productive energy-related conventions and conferences in the United States. The NAPE Summit, just held in February at the George R. Brown Convention Center, is one of those. The annual Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), another huge event, is coming up at NRG Park from May 6-9.

In between those two major events, the annual CERAWeek Conference kicks off on March 18, also at the George R. Brown. Where NAPE and OTC are focused on the oil and gas business, CERAWeek is the one event each year designed to bring together a broad cross-section of leaders from industry and the realm of government across all parts of the energy sector. Organized by S&P Global, the event has been held each year since 1983 – with the lone interruption of 2020. The event was cancelled that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and was held digitally in 2021, before returning to its traditional in-person format in 2022.

Recently, I was able to interview one of the co-founders of the event, S&P Global Vice Chairman and CERAWeek Chairman Daniel Yergin and remarked that due to its being held early in the year, the conference plays a key role in informing everyone involved in or covering the energy sector about the direction events are likely to take for the rest of the year. 2023 was a great example: The speakers at CERAWeek displayed a strong bias towards a re-prioritization on matters pertaining to energy security, and we saw that theme play out across the rest of the year.

Yergin agrees with that view. “I think that there was a tendency, particularly during the pandemic, for people to just forget about energy security - demand collapsed, prices collapsed, and it wasn't a concern,” he says. “And then so many things happened, beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Energy shocks, disruptions in supply chains, inflation, interest rates, further conflict in the Middle East, etc., and it really put energy security back on the agenda.”