Robert brelsford
Downstream Technology Editor
It's mid-February, and thank the petroleum gods and goddesses for that. For the OGJ technology editors, it means the 2016 conference season is about to kick off, and it couldn't be arriving at a more critical time for this industry.
This last year has been a particularly trying one for the petroleum industry. While the drop in prices has left many of our colleagues casualties of company-wide layoffs, it also has left those of us privileged enough to still be doing what we love wondering how long our current streak of seeming good fortune might last. Some of us may even have started to consider the probability of possibly having to revisit the unimaginable reality of our long-forgotten Plan Bs.
Back in my college days, I was a budding poet. At the time, and upon encouragement from several professors, I intended to make poetry my career. As committed as I was to it, I quickly learned poetry didn't quite cover the bills. If it didn't back then, I have a feeling it hardly could now.
A displaced poet
At the best of times, the oil patch is an unlikely place for a poet to be. Engineering and technology vs. feelings and emotions. Adherence to bottom-dollar lines vs. searching for deep, universal connections. The litany of paradoxes could go on forever.
Drop a poet in the oil patch during the thick of its latest bout with major price depression, however, and you've got a potentially combustible pairing, pun entirely intended.
Poets, by their natures, already are drawn to the darker and drearier dimensions of the world around them. It's not necessarily a doom-and-gloom kind of attraction, but it takes considerably less than you might think for us to get there.
I say this only to spotlight the flood of doom and gloom discussions recently painting the oil and gas landscape. Unquestionably, things are not what they used to be. Prices are down, activity has slowed, and the outlook is hardly as bright as it once may have seemed.
We've seen this before, though, and call me crazy, but I'm fairly certain we'll see it again and again. It's the nature of our industry and its connectedness, the global factors that shift and shape and impact each other like the proverbial flutter of butterfly wings across the world that results in the automobile accident here. It's cyclical and recurrent, and it will continue to unfold for as long as the sun keeps burning…or at least for as long as those of us still doing what we do continue to do it.
This is the time for our leaders to lead in ways they may perhaps have never been forced to do in the past. This is the time to regroup and reshape ourselves, to discover the next innovations, the future possibilities, to reexamine our old, tried-and-true technologies and processes in ways that allow us to unlock and perfect the new and even-greater potential still hidden within them.
The last thing any one of us needs to envision now is a portrait of a bleak and battered landscape. If words are colors, bust out the vibrant greens and vivid reds, the sun-bathed oranges and royal golds. There's opportunity in the mire of these doldrums…that's the picture to which all of us should be looking.
The road ahead
As downstream technology editor, Fortuna seems still to be smiling down on me, as I will be heading to San Francisco to the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers' (AFPM) annual meeting in just over a month.
If anyone understands the necessity of looking ahead instead of back, it's AFPM. They've outlined a fantastic program focused specifically on innovation and new approaches to old ways in the downstream sector (www.afpm.org).
Hopefully, I'll see some of you there.
