With this issue, Oil & Gas Journal closes out the year, the decade, the century, and the millennium with a bang.
As you can see, the issue is bigger than normal, a double issue. But what makes it a double issue is nothing new.
In fact, it's something old: a recombined Worldwide Report.
The Worldwide
Until 1992, what OGJ editors for many years called simply "the Worldwide" included country-by-country statistics on refining, reserves, and production.
The Worldwide always appeared in the last weekly issue of the year. And that was a problem.
Here was one of the most comprehensive compilations of industry statistics available, arriving on desks when no one was at work in much of the world.
Of course, the Worldwide issue would stay around all year. It was where someone could find distillation and processing capacities of any refinery, anywhere in the world, at a glance. It was where someone could look up estimates for oil and gas reserves for any country, along with production data, field by field in many cases.
It was a stout package of information appearing at a puny time of year.
Partly for that reason, OGJ decided in 1992 to split the upstream and downstream portions of the Worldwide and run the refining numbers in the year's second-to-last issue, the reserves and production numbers in the last.
The decision moved the Worldwide Refining report into a week when oil industry offices, for the most part, remained open if not fully inhabited. But the package was no longer a one-stop blockbuster. And what became the Worldwide Production report still suffered the timing problem.
This issue combines the best of both worldwides. Upstream and downstream have been reunited. And the combined report arrives before readers in the Christian world scoot home for a week or so of kicking back. So goes the hope, at any rate.
And next week? Well, OGJ staffers are going to kick back, too, for a change. They'll do it again the last week of next year, and the year after that. From now on, OGJ will end each year with a double-issue Worldwide Report and not publish in the year's final week.
A long bang
By the way, the bang with which OGJ closes out the millennium didn't start this week. Last week, OGJ flexed its editorial muscle with a special issue called Petroleum in the 21st Century.
Just the week before that it ran an important special called Developing Marginal Gas Fields. So the whole month has been a boomer.
Come to think of it, November had some specials you shouldn't have missed: Health Care and Trauma at Remote Locations, focus issues on production and refining, and the Pipeline Report.
Then there was October...
