If They Had No Fear, Why Should We?
Authors: Halbouty Michel T. 
Published: December 2007

Introductory Note: This editorial by Michel T. Halbouty is a significant contribution. It should cause some of our best tinkers in the petroleum industry to pause and reevaluate their contributions toward a better society and more profitable industry. The paper is timely in view of the prevalent pessimism and lack of determined leadership on the part of most industry personnel. The successful leaders of tomorrow will be individuals in today's petroleum industry who are as dedicated, determined and purposeful as those vividly illustrated by this editorial. WAYNE E. GLENN, President, Hudson's Bay Oil and Gas Co., Ltd.

Is the Industry Dead?

Many people and especially a great number of petroleum engineers are saying that the industry is too sick to ever recover and petroleum engineering is a "dead" college curriculum. We hear this pessimism too often; such statements are not true. I do not believe that the golden era of the petroleum engineer is behind us. We have only scratched the surface of this profession. Many people have dire predictions for engineering and the oil industry today because they think the industry as a whole is about to come to a miserable termination of some kind. This is the most ridiculous outlook any person could have. The industry is in a sort of a calm before the storm a period of transition. In fact, it is largely we engineers and scientists who are responsible for this change. We have always advocated purest conservation in its most effective and efficient form. To advocate any other course would have been gross prostitution of our profession. The petroleum industry started to change along about the middle 1930's and that change is only now catching up with us. We advocated and helped the start of proration, wider spacing and the other intelligent aspects of good conservation. By the middle 1930's, we had realized the mistakes our industry had made for 65 years and we were determined to correct them. We did not criticize those preceding us in the industry who engaged in wild and wasteful orgies of production. We recognized that what they did was due basically to a lack of knowledge. So, we set about to change the old ways and we did step by step slowly but surely. We changed the way of He of the oil industry. We eliminated booms. We eliminated the undeserved opportunity to get rich in a few days at the expense of destroying precious reservoirs of minerals. In looking back, one might assume that the day of opportunity is over. I do not feel that it is. On the contrary, opportunity in oil and gas is greater today than it has ever been before. The day of the rank promoter and the inexperienced and unworthy operator is over, but the day for the trained, experienced and industrious men of imagination in this industry has only begun. At long last, the industry is now entering the "age of technology"based on sound engineering and scientific principles.

The Present Challenge

One challenge that will never fade in our industry is our struggle to find new ways to effectively and efficiently find, drill and produce oil and gas. We must compete with foreign oil, with the new developments in coal, with our own natural gas and its products, and with the untold new ideas in the field of atomic energy, solar energy and other sources of energy which loom on the horizon today. We shall find better and less expensive ways to drill and produce oil. We shall find new uses for petroleum. We shall discover new ways of finding oil. In the minds of members of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is the oil industry of the future. One of our members may prove that using petroleum as a fuel is as insane as using gold to pave streets. He may find somehow that the hydrocarbons in crude oil are worth tens of times their present value when converted to more imaginative uses. Others will show us that even the most advanced methods and programs of conservation are still wasteful. Then people will look back on us much as we look back on the drillers at Titusville, Pithole, Spindletop, Cushing, Ranger, Signal Hill and East Texas (the last boom we had and ever will have). They will say what a pity it was that man did not have proper knowledge.

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