Robert Brelsford
Downstream Technology Editor
Despite surviving a nearly 8-year-long career as a crude oil price reporter for the petroleum industry before finding a home at Oil & Gas Journal, this editor rarely gave much thought to the language used to describe and distinguish-perhaps to our collective detriment-the various sectors of our business.
A simple Google search will tell you the industry is "often divided into" the categories of upstream, midstream, and downstream, but it's unlikely to tell you how that came to be.
Did we establish the nomenclature for ourselves? Was it coined by media, regulators, or the public at large? Was it something we adopted as a convenience rather than arrived at on our own?
The truth is, I can't say for sure. Were there more hours in a day, I'm fairly certain I could find an official answer. But as things stand for those of us weathering the storms that frequent our industry today, time is a precious commodity of which few of us have in excess.
Enlightenment
One of the most valuable lessons imparted to me since joining OGJ is the magazine's dedication to training its editors to view our technical divisions as simply the multiple parts of a unified whole, a series of branches that connect back to and ultimately are rooted in a single source.
This line of thinking, of course, might seem so outrageously obvious to some readers that they will wonder why one would expend the energy to even make such a point at all, and with good cause. The interrelatedness of our sectors, unquestionably, is a simple proposition, a basic fact of knowledge that most of us, at least intuitively, already know.
Before rushing to any judgment, however, I would ask readers to pause for just a moment to ask themselves this: how often in our daily navigations of the industry streams, regardless of our position in it, do we actually remember we know-and allow that knowledge to inform our everyday decisions-that we navigate the rapids of a shared and singular river?
Redefining fortune
A couple of weeks ago, I met an old friend for dinner at a Chinese restaurant around the corner.
She recently lost a position she'd held for over 9 years with an oil and gas operator due to budgetary cutbacks. It was a somber event, and one made seemingly worse by the time fortune cookies arrived.
I quickly cracked mine in half to find fine, red lettering that ran across the stark whiteness of the tiny strip of paper, which read the following: "The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists."
Aside from the slight irony I found in the fact that a Japanese proverb found its way into a Chinese fortune cookie, I felt a slight depression slightly descend before my friend interrupted.
"It's really how it is for us," she said. "The oil and gas industry is the bamboo that always bends, no?"
In a show of comfort and support, I agreed with her. But her hopeful outlook sparks a series of questions still unanswered for many of the "us" of the business. As the journalist, my role is to impartially record the industry's history as it unfolds, and while much of it involves progress and improvements made by the women and men with their feet-to-the-ground in processing plants and production sites, it also requires facing the rather unfortunate shadow of corporate greed that shapes not-so-progressive decisions at the executive level.
More saddening is the reality that the consequence of these actions (or inactions) rarely impact the decision makers themselves. The buck is passed, and the burden of blame and financial loss is felt by those least responsible for whatever error in judgment is made by the ones still taking home seven, eight, and nine-figure paychecks.
The health of any tree depends on the whole, and whether by sector-upstream, midstream, downstream-or by rank-top, middle, or root level-we're all part of the same tree, in the same rushing waters of what, in the end, is a single stream.
We can bend, yes. The better question is, however, how long we can do so before breaking.
