Industry Technical Advisory Committee (ITAC) 2016

The Industry Technical Advisory Committee (ITAC) is a non-commercial exchange of technical information between organisations which seek to share knowledge with each other to improve oil spill preparedness and response.  ITAC is organised by OSRL as part of our advocacy programme, and an ITAC meeting is currently held once per year, hosted in different locations that have resonance with the wider technical oil spill community.  We aim to blend both international themes with items of regional interest according to where the meeting is being held. 

ITAC’s Objectives

ITAC’s membership comprises oil industry (i.e. an open invitation to members of OSRL) international organisations (ITOPF, IMO, EMSA) invited Governmental organisations scientific researchers and academic research institutes involved in related technical studies.  The connection with academia is an important feature of the ITAC model, recognising that industry funds and supports a lot of university-based research but acknowledging that sometimes there is a disconnect with the sharing of knowledge and outputs from these studies with industry which ITAC seeks to address.

The story so far

ITAC was established in 1996 to address oil spill response technical issues of interest to OSRL’s member organisations and the wider response community. ITAC projects sought to provide advice, technical support, good-practice guidelines and benchmarking on key issues such as new technological developments in oil spill response techniques, training and response capabilities.

ITAC has evolved over last twenty years and in the post Macondo era, much of the delivery industry technical outputs is now being channelled through the OGP/IPIECA JIP and the API Joint Industry Task Force projects in the US.  ITAC has now been cast in the role of supporting outreach and communication for those industry technical outputs to reach a broader church of stakeholders in the wider oil spill community.  As such ITAC no longer “delivers” tangible work items but now offers a forum for knowledge sharing and information exchange.

Although ITAC is facilitated by OSRL the agenda is set by the ITAC membership through a small governance group comprised of its key constituents.  In this way we try to keep the content topical and relevant to a broad group of interested parties.