Beyond the Energy Transition: Building Common Ground Across the Energy System
For much of the past decade, the energy transition has been framed through competing narratives: oil and gas versus renewables, affordability versus sustainability, energy security versus decarbonization, and established industries versus emerging technologies. These divisions have often encouraged participants to defend positions rather than collaborate on the practical challenge of delivering reliable, affordable, and progressively lower-carbon energy to a growing global population.
This moderated conversation will explore how the energy dialogue is evolving beyond these binary debates toward a more pragmatic, inclusive, and technically grounded approach.
Drawing on experience as co-founder of Energy Disruptors, Graeme Edge will share insights from convening leaders across the energy system, including producers, utilities, technology companies, investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. The discussion will highlight where traditional narratives are shifting, where collaboration is driving tangible progress, why disagreement can be productive, and how trusted forums enable meaningful engagement across differing perspectives.
Olivier Houzé, 2025 SPE President, will complement this system-wide perspective with insights from the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the evolving role of the oil and gas professional community. The discussion will cover how SPE’s position has progressed from its 2016 work on the energy transition to the 2025 introduction of a technology-agnostic classification of its technical scope. This framework distinguishes core oil and gas activities, lower-carbon efforts such as CCUS and operational emissions reduction, and selected new-energy areas where subsurface expertise and petroleum technologies can contribute meaningfully.
The session will also examine the evolution of SPE’s energy narratives, its growing technical collaboration with the International Energy Agency, and the importance of the energy transition for the next generation of professionals—particularly in developing economies, where energy access, affordability, industrial development, and emissions reduction must be addressed in parallel.
Moderated by Dan Burt, the conversation will move beyond advocacy for any single pathway. Instead, it will focus on how established industries, emerging technologies, and diverse professional communities can identify areas of constructive disagreement, shared purpose, and practical collaboration.
Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how the energy conversation is evolving, what each part of the system can realistically contribute, and why constructive dialogue may be as critical as technology in shaping the future of energy.
Registration closes on Tuesday, September 1, 2026 at 8AM.
Date/Time
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Registration: 11:45 AM MDT
Start Time: 12:00 PM MDT
End Time: 1:30 PM MDT
Location
Energy Technology Centre at The Ampersand
East Tower - 5th Floor
112 4 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2P 3N3*This event will be hosted both in-person and virtually.
Speaker Bios
Speakers:
Graeme Edge (LinkedIn)
Co-Founder, Energy Disruptors
Graeme Edge is the Scottish-born entrepreneur behind Energy Disruptors: UNITE, Canada's largest energy leadership summit and one of the few places where the people disrupting the energy system sit in the same room as the people running it.
He is also the founder of ScaleBlaze, a specialist executive search firm built on a simple conviction: every breakthrough in energy comes down to one thing. Exceptional leadership. He has built from scratch, taken risks, and scaled successfully. He finds the leaders who build what is next.
Olivier Houzé (LinkedIn)
2025 SPE President
Olivier Houzé is the co-founder and managing director of KAPPA. After four years as a well test field engineer with Flopetrol (SLB), he co-founded KAPPA in 1987. He was the original author of Saphir, now the industry standard software in pressure transient analysis, and has served as KAPPA managing director since 1991.
Houzé has been involved in many SPE summits, forums, and workshops. He coauthored one SPE and one SPEE monographs. He was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 2013 and served on the SPE Board as the Technical Director for Reservoir from 2012 to 2015. He was the recipient of the 2019 SPE Lester C. Uren Award and a 2022 SPE Honorary Award. He returned to the Board in 2023 as its 2025 SPE President.
He holds an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique (1982) and an MSc in petroleum engineering from Stanford University (1983).Moderator:
Dan Burt (LinkedIn)
SPE Gaia North America Liaison
Dan Burt is an energy systems and emissions specialist working with industry, academics and governments to create solutions to energy system challenges like climate change and energy availability. Dan believes that through deep collaboration, stakeholders can preserve and enhance energy availability and standard of living in a carbon-constrained world. He has spent the last 17 years working in the Canadian energy industry on greenhouse quantification and disclosure, technology evaluation, and life cycle assessment. Prior to that, Dan spent 12 years building and operating oil and gas facilities in Western Canada. His research interests include the intersection of energy, environment and economy, with emphasis on solutions to fossil fuel emissions. Dan holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Memorial University of Newfoundland (1997), a Master of Engineering in Petroleum Recovery and Reservoir Engineering (2006) and a Master of Science in Energy and Environmental Systems (2013) both from the University of Calgary.
**Please Note
Lunch will be provided. Please be sure to include your dietary restrictions during the online registration process so we can do our best to accommodate.
Group Discount (10+ People)