Hundreds gathered in Houston today for the opening of the NAPE Summit Business Conference. This annual networking event is designed to bring prospects, producers and purchasers together to forge important business connections and mine opportunities.

Related: Winter NAPE Expo Business Conference Highlights – 2014

In an industry riddled with recent uncertainty, the atmosphere at the conference was marked by optimism. Bob Fryklund, Chief Upstream Strategist for IHS, set the tone in his opening comments as he encouraged participants not to push the panic button too quickly. Though he acknowledged the conversation has changed in recent months, he reminded participants of the record production set by North American producers in the last five years.

Many of the speakers spent part of their time talking about record production set by North American producers over the years and cyclical nature of the industry. History showed we would weather this storm.

Jack Stark, President and COO of Continental Resources continued the theme by listing some of the industry wins including:

• Unprecedented growth from 2005-2015
• World changing upstream technologies
• Discovering a whole new, vast class of reservoir (shale plays)
• Reserves at all time highs
• Created jobs and increased our energy independence
• Improved efficiencies such as cutting drilling time from 45 days to 17
• A midstream evolution: pipelines, rail, rail to barge and connections to all coasts

For more about NAPE, visit napexpo.com