The context of context

March 27, 2017
Bob Enright doubted the project would work.

Bob Enright doubted the project would work.

Phillips Petroleum Co. was contemplating a waterflood of Ekofisk oil field off Norway. This was in 1981, long before the company's marriage with Conoco Inc.

Enright, then executive editor of Oil & Gas Journal, had covered unsuccessful waterfloods of the Austin Chalk in Texas earlier in his career.

Problems with chalk

To a casual group of OGJ colleagues, he explained that Ekofisk produced also from chalk. Phillips was bound to encounter the reservoir damage that had bedeviled those Texan floods.

Validity of Enright's concern isn't the subject here. The subject is the wonder of a then-young editor at the perspicacity displayed by a personable Midwesterner just chatting with friends over coffee.

Enright combined encyclopedic memory with the ability to relate seemingly unconnected ideas in ways that seemed other-worldly.

A more-recent encounter brought Enright back to mind.

A former staff member, a technical editor with industry experience before and after his too-few years at OGJ, stopped by on other business. After soliciting and receiving the abbreviated report about a staff much younger than the one he remembered, he offered a jewel of insight.

Experience and expertise are important, he said. What really matters, though, is context.

Of course!

It was the context that comes with writing about oil and gas work here, there, and everywhere-not to mention a first-class mind-that enabled Enright to relate geographically disparate waterfloods three and a half decades ago.

And it's context that makes what OGJ editors-from the youngest and least-experienced to the, well, more senior-store in their overpressured minds uniquely valuable.

When he died too young in October 1984, Enright had worked at OGJ for 34 years. He possessed context galore.

Staff members of the time of his death fondly recalled a Journally Speaking column he wrote in the Jan. 1, 1979, issue of OGJ responding to excited reporting elsewhere of leaping oil "reserves" in Mexico.

One news outlet had fixated on an estimate of 200 billion bbl and implied that Mexico would be another Saudi Arabia.

In his column, Enright pointed out that the number applied to a government projection of Mexico's oil, natural gas, and gas liquids potential, not reserves.

At the time, the Mexican government estimated its reserves at 20 billion bbl-including the crude oil equivalent of natural gas and gas liquids.

OGJ reported Mexican crude reserves at 16 billion bbl.

That volume, Enright wrote, happened to be the amount by which Saudi Arabia revised its reserves estimate between 1978 and 1979-upwardly, of course.

Enright ended his column by asking, "Does this mean Saudi Arabia has added another Mexico?"

The man could make a point.

Of course, his initial pessimism about the Ekofisk waterflood, grounded as it was in experience, eventually yielded to outcome.

Phillips didn't expand the pilot project under way at Enright's death until 1987. But it worked.

Water injection has boosted recovery in the field, discovered in 1969 and producing since 1971, from an originally expected 17% to more than 50% estimated now.

Enhancing reservoir management is a program called Ekofisk Life of Field Seismic, installed in 2010 with technology unknown when Phillips began thinking about waterflooding chalk and an OGJ veteran wondered why.

Enright would have welcomed the success that discredited his doubt. He would have studied how Phillips made the project work and absorbed the knowledge and applied it as perspective in coverage about whatever waterflood of whatever chalk came next.

Producing from what?

And what delight he would have found, many years later, in writing about a still more-impactful technological high-jump: producing oil and gas from source rock! And, in one special case, not just any source rock but the Eagle Ford shale, origin of hydrocarbons in-what else?-the Austin Chalk.

Enright had context. He would have relished the intellectual linking of geologic and technical developments like those. It's what OGJ editors do.