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 the oil and gas industry.
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 business sectors, unquestionably, is a simple proposition, a basic fact that most of us, at least intuitively, already know.
Before rushing to any judgment, however, I would ask readers to pause for 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 the currently weak oil price environment, increasing regulatory hurdles, not to mention uncertainties regarding future infrastructure and export laws, facing us are rapids on our shared and singular river?
Redefining fortune
A few weeks ago, I met a friend for dinner at a Chinese restaurant around the corner. She recently lost a position she’d held for more than 9 years with an upstream operator amid cutbacks. It was a somber meal, and one made seemingly worse by the time fortune cookies arrived.
I cracked mine apart to find fine, red lettering across the stark whiteness of the tiny paper strip that read: "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 had found its way into a Chinese fortune cookie, I felt a slight depression descend before my friend swiftly interrupted.
"It’s really how it is for us," she said. "This industry we’re in, we’re the bamboo that always bends, no?"
And she’s right.
At the time of this writing, this editor is in New Orleans for the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers 2015 Q&A & Technology Forum.
It’s a downstream industry event, but with a couple of presentations and countless conversations now behind me, the unified awareness of our industry’s interconnectedness at this "sector-specific" gathering illustrates a simple truth upon which this editor tries to begin each day reflecting.
Like the unwavering city from which I write-a city that has cradled our industry even while enduring its own inconceivable devastations-our greatest strength is our collective resilience.
These are challenging times for our business as a whole. Regardless of labels, we’re all in the same white, rushing waters of a single stream.
Upstream, midstream, downstream, resilience is in our unified blood.
We bend, yes. But break? Never.