President’s Column: Inside SPE Governance
Authors: Houzé Olivier 
Published: December 2024

Editor’s Note: This is a summary of the December episode of the President’s vodcast. We encourage you to watch the episode to see the full conversation.

This month’s column covers SPE’s governance, with a particular focus on the SPE Board of Directors and the way its members are selected. It revisits the 2022 controversy of the SPE-AAPG merger project and the Board petitions that followed. It is concluded with a proposed to-do list to improve our governance processes and increase membership communication and interaction.

I will start with an explanation of our current process: In early November 2024, SPE announced the opening of the nomination cycle for the SPE International Board of Directors. A third of the SPE Board positions are open this year with the 2027 President, two regional directors (RD), and three technical directors (TD) to be selected.

The process always starts with our members, who are expected to nominate the candidates. It may finish with members’ votes, but this is only in case of petition(s).

Candidates must be nominated before 25 January 2025. Explanations are given here: https://www.spe.org/en/about/nominate/. Nomination forms are available here: https://www.spe.org/en/forms/bod/.

This year the Nominating Committee is chaired by the 2024 President Terry Palisch. The Nominating Committee will select from qualified candidates, and the new slate of recommended nominees will be approved by the Board and communicated to the membership in the April 2025 edition of JPT.

Members who object to any of these nominations will have 45 days to initiate a petition for an alternate candidate from at least 1% of the membership for the position of President and 2% of the concerned members for any other director position. Nominees who are not subject to a successful petition will be confirmed. Successful petitions, if any, will trigger a membership vote between the Board nominee and the petitioners’ nominee. Whatever the outcome, all new members will join the Board for 3 years, commencing at the 2025 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE).

Petitions are rare, but we had a memorable set of three in 2022 in the wake of the (failed) attempt at an SPE-AAPG merger. Two TD and one RD nominations were challenged. All three petitions were successful, and three votes took place. The Board nominees (Hamad Al-Marri, Robert Martinez, and Robin Macmillan) were confirmed against petitioners’ nominees with scores ranging between 53% and 57%. Time flies, and this year they are outgoing Board directors and members of the new Nominating Committee.

I was an at-large member of the Nominating Committee in 2022 when the petitions were initiated, and I took an active part in the online debate that followed. It was heated at times, with occasional accusations of corruption, collusion, irreversible loss of credibility, a bit of ad hominem trolling, etc. It was tense but also (I confess) entertaining.

I was relieved to see our choices approved by the membership, but with an average score of 45% the petitioners turned out to be very relevant candidates. However, the low participation (15%) was a signal that neither side should celebrate: we were royally ignored by 85% of our membership, and with this level of participation, it could have gone either way. As an aside, this 15% turnout is consistent with other professional societies that elect their leadership directly by membership vote.