What...you don't speak Wingdings*?

Robert brelsford
Downstream Technology Editor

A sharp, cool sting from stray gusts of winds that seem only to blow in the last few moments before what's left of darkness dissolves itself completely into dawn. The faint but steady crackle underfoot of barely frosted dewdrops that cling defiantly to umber remnants of what just days ago still formed an emerald undergrowth.

In Texas, all signs point to one thing: November is here, and it's officially hunting season.

During his childhood, the proverbial thrill of the pursuit wasn't so much a thrill for this future OGJ editor as it was an encumbrance.

The 2:00 a.m. wakeup calls alongside no-eating-so-the-prey-won't-smell-you and sitting-in-absolute-silence-and-stillness-for-hours-in-the-dark rules sabotaged any hopes a father and brother had of molding him into the perfect marksman.

After many years of hauling him on many trips along and through the rocky creeks and rolling brush of Guadalupe County, they rightfully gave up trying.

At the time, the mystical experience of the hunt was as foreign to me as a language penned in Sanskrit. The only element of it that ever really clicked for me was the art involved in camouflage. Unsurprisingly, the notion of hiding in wide-open spaces remains as alluring for many global refiners today as it did for that boy of ten.

Visibly (un)concealed

And this editor should know. It's November, just weeks before the release of OGJ's Worldwide Refining Survey, and the scramble to uncover omitted bits and pieces from respondents is in full swing.

While the US Energy Information Administration has precluded the opportunity for US refiners to fully conceal operational data with the annual release of its Refinery Capacity Report, international refining outfits increasingly have embraced iterations of language EIA has often used to describe its own nondisclosure of some information (i.e., phrases such as "of a proprietary" and/or "confidential in" nature) to defend their own nonreporting of certain refining data.

The tactic, of course, is understandable. As it has been since its inception in 1926, OGJ's survey is voluntary. No global government or regulatory body mandates operators to respond, and save for certain contractual requirements between select parties active in the global trade of crude, no adverse impacts directly result from an operator's choice not to participate. Yes, you may and do look slightly smarmy to fellow refiners that return timely and completed surveys, but you'll hardly go to jail for it.

Besides, the lack of a response no longer means your operations are exempted from the scrutiny of peers. As much as the current age of technology has robbed us of our personal downtime and the possibility of ever truly logging out-and-off for the day, it has given us even more in terms of discoverable data.

A search engine, properly dredged, can float more to the top of its return list than should ever have been allowed to lurk in its depths at all.

Lost in...translation?

Case in point: There are parts of the world where operators guard data like diamonds while government regulations mandate public disclosure. (Like motives sometimes, location, here, is incidental.)

Last week, survey returns had yet to reflect a current response from one of the region's fairly major refiners, so this editor opted for Plan B, based on a single lesson that stuck from those early days of failed attempts at hunting: be patient, aim, and fire.

An hour later, a refinery representative politely asks where I have found the data which I'm now asking her to confirm. I direct her to the web site.

"This is only scribbles and symbols and squiggles," she says, slightly frazzled.

"Wingdings," I reply.

"This is language?" she asks.

"What, your government speaks Wingdings but you don't?" I ask.

We share a laugh before I explain to her the trick of quick translation.

Whatever it is, it's out there. And I've always preferred a game of hide-and-seek to hunting.

*A font that uses character symbols rather than traditional letters released in 1992 by Microsoft Corp., which owns the trademark.