These resulting first impressions are a reminder that the industry is not just machines and shares. It is a community, a culture and a power in the land that its chieftains are right to say needs some explaining these days.

Oil, like any global issue, affects and is affected by the macro and the micro, the big and the small. In the same way, faith can be so personal as to color a family dinner, yet also be grand enough to direct a nation’s policies.

Oil is like that. When a conference comes along to tackle issues of the oil services industry in Alberta, you hear as much about far-flung lands with bubbling political tensions as you do about local companies. The big and the small, brought together by the universal religion of oil.

That’s what the summer Edmonton Energy Services Summit was: a gathering of the oil faithful. Like a church retreat, it had food, fellowship, and frank, faith-based discussion. All culminated in the communion of the Edmonton Indy – the power of their religion made manifest in race cars zooming around the track, as fast as gods and twice as loud.

Like a religious gathering, a lot of the conference was about reaffirming basic tenets of the faith. Opportunities abound in the industry. Demand won’t collapse. Oil will survive, come greenwashing or global conflict.

It was a secular version of a traditional priestly message – fear not, neither let your heart be troubled. But as markets seemed to be finally reacting to classical economic principles – as of this writing, oil is down to $116 a barrel, though putting the word “down” in front of that figure seems a little surreal – conference participants, though optimistic, seemed to want answers.

This is what the big speakers address. People like Anne McLellan, former deputy prime minister and natural resources minister, and World Petroleum Council president Randy Gossen, freshly returned from a World Petroleum Congress, speak like prophets or preachers to networking masses sporting lanyards and name tags.

First McLellan, a strategic adviser for the Bennett Jones LLP law firm since electoral fortunes sent her back into the private sector, comes armed with comprehensive graphs shining on large screens on either side of her that connect the price of oil with global politics. “We all need to understand geopolitical events,” she says in the hotel ballroom. “They might tell you how your company will do more than any other indicator.”

Historically, whenever tensions rise in oil-rich countries or anywhere close to them, so do prices. Nowadays when Israel gets into a fight in Lebanon for instance, arousing thoughts that conflict might spread to oil-producing parts of the Middle East and disrupt supplies, the market jumps. McLellan’s graph could very well be about this twitchiness. Her sermon is about keeping global perspective, because the oil sands may be the source of the boom, but the energy services industry needs to look beyond.

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