Industry manager oil and gas Rob Bush said APPEA had afforded the company the chance to meet with potential customers that had previously been under the radar.
"It has been a positive conference, even though the market is down," he said.
"I think maybe we are seeing the small green shoots of the recovery."
The company is looking beyond the mammoth Gorgon, Australia Pacific LNG and Ichthys projects in a development sense and moving into the sustain phase, towards fields such as AWE's Waitsia development and other areas of potential growth.
"They are also putting in new pipelines, like the Northern Gas Pipeline that will open up opportunities for some of the smaller players, and we can see a role there," he said.
Bush said the company wanted to push its new ‘co-innovation agenda' and its Transformation 2017 strategy into to the Australian market, to work with new and existing customers to develop new technologies, and its new oil and gas centre of excellence.
Reacting to Woodside Petroleum CEO Peter Coleman's calls for the energy sector to follow the lead of tech giant Apple and reinvent itself every few years, Bush said that was entirely achievable.
"If people change the way they communicate with each other, so they are not just in a supplier-user relationship but more of a partnership to develop the technologies, we can advance and improve the business without the barrier of the traditional supplier-customer relationships," he said.
"There will always be contracts, but we can have this frictionless technology exchange."
Coleman has also waged a vendetta on the practice of keeping technological advantages behind firewalls, and that is a concept Bush already embraces.
"That is something we have started to do. If we develop a certain technology with one customer, as long as it is not too IP-heavy we can develop that further for others to help customers," Bush said.
He believes that remote operations and remote monitoring will be one of the biggest changes in the near future.
"It has been available for a while, but we are seeing a lot of changes in that space. People have fears about security, but we can demonstrate there are the security technologies available, and the ability to do more and more remotely is more in demand so we can take people away from the risk areas and let them to home to their families at night," he said.
"We can do the same as they have done offshore, but onshore, from the CBD office."
The technology is attracting oil companies from Chevron Corporation on Barrow Island to minnow Bridgeport Energy, which is changing its Utopia oil field in the Surat Basin to unmanned status.
"We have an onshore project north of Perth that has a single well, Red Gully-1, and that well is controlled from Empire Oil & Gas' Perth office, and it can be scaled up easily," he explained.
Remote technologies span from simple monitoring and data gathering to full control of the wellhead.
He tips that in a decade we could see completely unmanned major offshore oil fields in Australia.
He says multiple sites can also be moved into a single control centre.
